The Liberal Imagination
ESSAYS ON LITERATURE AND SOCIETY
by Lionel Trilling
New York 1950
PUBLISHED BY The Viking Press
COPYRIGHT 1950 BY LIONEL TRILLING
COPYRIGHT 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949,
BY LIONEL TRILLING;
1948 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
PUBLISHED BY THE VIKING PRESS IN APRIL 1950
PUBLISHED ON THE SAME DAY IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED
SECOND PRINTING MAY 1950
The bibliographical note on pages xv-xvi records
where the essays in this book, or earlier versions of
them, originally appeared.
PRINTED IN U.S.A. BY VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC.
To Jacques Barzun
Contents
Preface ix
Reality in America 3
Sherwood Anderson 22
Freud and Literature 34
The Princess Casamassima 58
The Function of the Little Magazine 93
Huckleberry Finn 104
Kipling 118
The Immortality Ode 129
Art and Neurosis 160
The Sense of the Past 181
Tacitus Now 198
Manners, Morals, and the Novel 205
The Kinsey Report 223
F. Scott Fitzgerald 243
Art and Fortune 255
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 281
Preface
The essays of this volume were written over the last ten years,
the greater number within the last three or four years. I have
substantially revised almost all of them, but I have not changed
the original intent of any. The bibliographical note indicates
the circumstances of their first publication. For permission to
reprint them here I am grateful to The American Quarterly,
Horizon, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Leader, The
New York Times Book Review, and Partisan Review, and
the Columbia University Press, The Dial Press, The Macmillan Company, New Directions, and Rinehart and Company.
Although the essays are diverse in subject, they have, I believe, a certain unity. One way, perhaps the quickest way, of
suggesting what this unity is might be to say that it derives from
an abiding interest in the ideas of what we loosely call liberalism, especially the relation of these ideas to literature.
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the
dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the
plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course,
that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such
impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than
most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in
action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble
ideas.
ix
x Preface
This intellectual condition of conservatism and reaction
will perhaps seem to some liberals a fortunate thing. When we
say that a movement is "bankrupt of ideas" we are likely to
suppose that it is at the end of its powers. But this is not so,
and it is dangerous for us to suppose that it is so, as the experience of Europe in the last quarter-century suggests, for in the
modern situation it is just when a movement despairs of having ideas that it turns to force, which it masks in ideology.
What is more, it is not conducive to the real strength of liberalism that it should occupy the intellectual field alone. In the
course of one of the essays of this book I refer to a remark of
John Stuart Mill's in his famous article on Coleridge Mill,
at odds with Coleridge all down the intellectual and political
line, nevertheless urged all liberals to become acquainted with
this powerful conservative mind. He said that the prayer of
every true partisan of liberalism should be, " 'Lord, enlighten
thou our enemies . . . '; sharpen their wits, give acuteness to
their perceptions and consecutiveness and clearness to their
reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from
their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength/' What Mill meant, of course, was that
the intellectual pressure which an opponent like Coleridge
could exert would force liberals to examine their position for
its weaknesses and complacencies.
We cannot very well set about to contrive opponents who
will do us the service of forcing us to become more intelligent,
who will require us to keep our ideas from becoming stale,
habitual, and inert. This we will have to do for ourselves. It
has for some time seemed to me that a criticism which has at
heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful
work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general right-
ness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the
liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time. If liberal"
ism is, as I believe it to be, a large tendency rather than a con-
Preface xl
cise body of doctrine, then, as that large tendency makes itself
explicit, certain of its particular expressions are bound to be
relatively weaker than others, and some even useless and mistaken. If this is so, then for liberalism to be aware of the weak
or wrong expressions of itself would seem to be an advantage
to the tendency as a whole.
Goethe says somewhere that there is no such thing as a liberal idea, that there are only liberal sentiments. This is true.
Yet it is also true that certain sentiments consort only with
certain ideas and not with others. What is more, sentiments
become ideas by a natural and imperceptible process. "Our
continued influxes of feeling/' said Wordsworth, "are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings/' And Charles Peguy said,
"Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique" everything begins in sentiment and assumption and finds its issue
in political action and institutions. The converse is also true:
just as sentiments become ideas, ideas eventually establish
themselves as sentiments.
If this is so, if between sentiments and ideas there is a natural
connection so close as to amount to a kind of identity, then the
connection between literature and politics will be seen as a
very immediate one. And this will seem especially true if we
do not intend the narrow but the wide sense of the word politics. It is the wide sense of the word that is nowadays forced
upon us, for clearly it is no longer possible to think of politics
except as the politics of culture, the organization of human
life toward some end or other, toward the modification of sentiments, which is to say the quality of human life. The word
liberal is a word primarily of political import, but its political
meaning defines itself by the quality of life it envisages, by the
sentiments it desires to affirm. This will begin to explain why
a writer of literary criticism involves himself with political
considerations. These are not political essays, they are essays
xii Preface
in literary criticism. But they assume the inevitable intimate,
if not always obvious, connection between literature and
politics.
The making of the connection requires, as I have implied,
no great ingenuity, nor any extravagant manipulation of the
word literature or, beyond taking it in the large sense specified, of the word politics. It is a connection which is quickly
understood and as quickly made and acted upon by certain
governments. And although it is often resisted by many very
good literary critics, it has for some time been accepted with
enthusiasm by the most interesting of our creative writers; the
literature of the modern period, of the last century and a half,
has been characteristically political. Of the writers of the last
hundred and fifty years who command our continuing attention, the very large majority have in one way or another turned
their passions, their adverse, critical, and very intense passions,
upon the condition of the polity. The preoccupation with the
research into the self that has marked this literature, and the
revival of the concepts of religion that has marked a notable
part of it, do not controvert but rather support the statement
about its essential commitment to politics.
When Mill urged liberals to read Coleridge, he had in mind
not merely Coleridge's general power of intellect as it stood
in critical opposition to the liberalism of the day; he had also
in mind certain particular attitudes and views that sprang, as
he believed, from Coleridge's nature and power as a poet. Mill
had learned through direct and rather terrible experience
what the tendency of liberalism was in regard to the sentiments
and the imagination. From the famous "crisis" of his youth he
had learned, although I believe he never put it in just this way,
that liberalism stood in a paradoxical relation to the emotions.
The paradox is that liberalism is concerned with the emotions
above all else, as proof of which the word happiness stands at
the very center of its thought, but in its effort to establish the
emotions, or certain among them, in some sort of freedom,
Preface xiii
liberalism somehow tends to deny them in their full possibility. Dickens' Hard Times serves to remind us that the liberal
principles upon which Mill was brought up, although extreme, were not isolated and unique, and the principles o
Mill's rearing very nearly destroyed him, as in fact they did
destroy the Louisa Gradgrind of Dickens' novel. And nothing
is more touching than the passionate gratitude which Mill
gave to poetry for having restored him to the possibility of an
emotional life after he had lived in a despairing apathy which
brought him to the verge of suicide. That is why, although his
political and metaphysical disagreement with Coleridge was
extreme, he so highly valued Coleridge's politics and metaphysics he valued them because they were a poet's, and he
hoped that they might modify liberalism's tendency to envisage the world in what he called a "prosaic" way and recall
liberals to a sense of variousness and possibility. Nor did he
think that there was only a private emotional advantage to be
gained from the sense of variousness and possibility he believed it to be an intellectual and political necessity.
Contemporary liberalism does not depreciate emotion in
the abstract, and in the abstract it sets great store by variousness
and possibility. Yet, as is true of any other human entity, the
conscious and the unconscious life of liberalism are not always
in accord. So far as liberalism is active and positive, so far, that
is, as it moves toward organization, it tends to select the emotions and qualities that are most susceptible of organization.
As it carries out its active and positive ends it unconsciously
limits its view of the world to what it can deal with, and it
unconsciously tends to develop theories and principles, particularly in relation to the nature of the human mind, that
justify its limitation. Its characteristic paradox appears again,
and in another form, for in the very interests of its great primal
act of imagination by which it establishes its essence and existence in the interests, that is, of its vision of a general enlargement and freedom and rational direction of human life
xiv Preface
it drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination.
And in the very interest of affirming its confidence in the power
of the mind, it inclines to constrict and make mechanical its
conception of the nature of mind. Mill, to refer to him a last
time, understood from his own experience that the imagination was properly the joint possession of the emotions and the
intellect, that it was fed by the emotions, and that without it
the intellect withers and dies, that without it the mind cannot
work and cannot properly conceive itself. I do not know
whether or not Mill had particularly in mind a sentence from
the passage from Thomas Burnet's Archaeologiae Philosophicae which Coleridge quotes as the epigraph to The Ancient
Mariner, the sentence in which Burnet says that a judicious belief in the existence of demons has the effect of keeping the
mind from becoming "narrow, and lapsed entirely into mean
thoughts/' but he surely understood what Coleridge, who believed in demons as little as Mill did, intended by his citation
of the passage. Coleridge wanted to enforce by that quaint sentence from Burnet what is the general import of The Ancient
Mariner apart from any more particular doctrine that exegesis
may discover that the world is a complex and unexpected
and terrible place which is not always to be understood by the
mind as we use it in our everyday tasks.
It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify, and this
tendency is natural in view of the effort which liberalism
makes to organize the elements of life in a rational way. And
when we approach liberalism in a critical spirit, we shall fail
in critical completeness if we do not take into account the value
and necessity of its organizational impulse. But at the same
time we must understand that organization means delegation,
and agencies, and bureaus, and technicians, and that the ideas
that can survive delegation, that can be passed on to agencies
and bureaus and technicians, incline to be ideas of a certain
kind and of a certain simplicity: they give up something of
their largeness and modulation and complexity in order to
Preface xv
survive. The lively sense of contingency and possibility, and
of those exceptions to the rule which may be the beginning of
the end of the rule this sense does not suit well with the impulse to organization. So that when we come to look at liberalism in a critical spirit, we have to expect that there will be a dis-
crepancy between what I have called the primal imagination
of liberalism and its present particular manifestations.
The job of criticism would seem to be, then, to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.
To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance, not merely because
so much of modern literature has explicitly directed itself
upon politics, but more importantly because literature is the
human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account
of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.
L. T.
New York
December, 1949
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
"Reality in America/' part i, was first published in Partisan Review,
January-February, 1940; part ii was first published in The Nation, April
20, 1946.
"Sherwood Anderson" was first published in The Kenyan Review,
Summer, 1941; some of the added matter appeared in The New York
Times Book Review, November 9, 1947.
"Freud and Literature" was first published in The Kenyan Review,
Spring, 1940, and in revised form in Horizon, September, 1947.
"The Princess Casamassima" was first published as the introduction
to Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, New York, The Macmillan
Company, 1948.
"The Function of the Little Magazine" was first published as the introduction to The Partisan Reader: Ten Years of Partisan Review,
I 933~~ I 944 : dn Anthology, edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv,
New York, The Dial Press, 1946.
xvi Preface
"Huckleberry Finn" was first published as the introduction to Mark
Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, New York, Rinehart and
Company, 1948.
"Kipling" was first published in The Nation, October 16, 1943.
"The Immortality Ode" was read before the English Institute, September 1941, and first published in The English Institute Annual, 1941,
New York, Columbia University Press, 1942.
"Art and Neurosis" was first published in Partisan Review, Winter,
1945; some of the material added in the present version appeared in
The New Leader, December 13, 1947.
"The Sense of the Past" was read before the English Graduate Union
of Columbia University in February 1942, and first published in Partisan Review, May-June 1942.
"Tacitus Now" was first published in The Nation, August 22, 1942.
"Manners, Morals, and the Novel" was read at the Conference on the
Heritage of the English-Speaking Peoples and Their Responsibilities,
at Kenyon College, September 1947, and first published in The Kenyan
Review, Winter, 1948.
"The Kinsey Report" was first published in Partisan Revieio. April
1948.
"F. Scott Fitzgerald" was first published in The Nation, April 25,
1945; some of the material added in the present version first appeared
in
the introduction to The Great Gatsby, New York, New Directions, 1945.
"Art and Fortune" was read before the English Institute, September
1948 and first published in Partisan Review, December 1948.
"The Meaning of a Literary Idea" was read at the Conference in
American Literature at the University of Rochester, February 1949, and
first published in The American Quarterly, Fall, 1949.
The Liberal Imagination
Reality in America
It is possible to say of V. L. Parrington that with his Main
Currents in American Thought he has had an influence on our
conception of American culture which is not equaled by that
of any other writer of the last two decades. His ideas are
now the accepted ones wherever the college course in Ameri-
can literature is given by a teacher who conceives himself to
be opposed to the genteel and the academic and in alliance
with the vigorous and the actual. And whenever the liberal
historian of America finds occasion to take account of the
national literature, as nowadays he feels it proper to do, it is
Parrington who is his standard and guide. Parrington's ideas
are the more firmly established because they do not have to
be imposed the teacher or the critic who presents them is
likely to find that his task is merely to make articulate for his
audience what it has always believed, for Parrington formulated in a classic way the suppositions about our culture which
are held by the American middle class so far as that class is at
all liberal in its social thought and so far as it begins to understand that literature has anything to do with society.
Parrington was not a great mind; he was not a precise
thinker or, except when measured by the low eminences that
were about him, an impressive one. Separate Parrington from
his informing idea of the economic and social determination
of thought and what is left is a simple intelligence, notable for
its generosity and enthusiasm but certainly not for its accuracy
4 The Liberal Imagination
or originality. Take him even with his idea and he is, once its
direction is established, rather too predictable to be continuously interesting; and, indeed, what we dignify with the name
of economic and social determinism amounts in his use of it
to not much more than the demonstration that most writers
incline to stick to their own social class. But his best virtue
was real and important he had what we like to think of as the
saving salt of the American mind, the lively sense of the practical, workaday world, of the welter of ordinary undistinguished things and people, of the tangible, quirky, unrefined
elements of life. He knew what so many literary historians do
not know, that emotions and ideas are the sparks that fly when
the mind meets difficulties.
Yet he had after all but a limited sense of what constitutes a
difficulty. Whenever he was confronted with a work of art that
was complex, personal and not literal, that was not, as it were,
a public document, Parrington was at a loss. Difficulties that
were complicated by personality or that were expressed in the
language of successful art did not seem quite real to him and
he was inclined to treat them as aberrations, which is one way
of saying what everybody admits, that the weakest part of Parrington's talent was his aesthetic judgment. His admirers and
disciples like to imply that his errors of aesthetic judgment
are merely lapses of taste, but this is not so. Despite such mistakes as his notorious praise of Cabell, to whom in a remarkable passage he compares Melville, Parrington's taste was by
no means bad. His errors are the errors of understanding
which arise from his assumptions about the nature of reality.
Parrington does not often deal with abstract philosophical
ideas, but whenever he approaches a work of art we are made
aware of the metaphysics on which his aesthetics is based.
There exists, he believes, a thing called reality; it is one and
immutable, it is wholly external, it is irreducible. Men's minds
may waver, but reality is always reliable, always the same, always easily to be known. And the artist's relation to reality he
Reality in America 5
conceives as a simple one. Reality being fixed and given, the
artist has but to let it pass through him, he is the lens in the
first diagram of an elementary book on optics: Fig i, Reality;
Fig. 2, Artist; Fig. i', Work of Art. Figs, i and i' are normally
in virtual correspondence with each other. Sometimes the
artist spoils this ideal relation by "turning away from" reality.
This results in certain fantastic works, unreal and ultimately
useless. It does not occur to Parrington that there is any other
relation possible between the artist and reality than this passage of reality through the transparent artist; he meets evidence of imagination and creativeness with a settled hostility
the expression of which suggests that he regards them as the
natural enemies of democracy.
In this view of things, reality, although it is always reliable,
is always rather sober-sided, even grim. Parrington, a genial
and enthusiastic man, can understand how the generosity of
man's hopes and desires may leap beyond reality; he admires
will in the degree that he suspects mind. To an excess of
desire and energy which blinds a man to the limitations of
reality he can indeed be very tender. This is one of the many
meanings he gives to romance or romanticism, and in spite of
himself it appeals to something in his own nature. The praise
of Cabell is Parrington's response not only to Cabell's elegance for Parrington loved elegance but also to Cabell's
insistence on the part which a beneficent self-deception may
and even should play in the disappointing fact-bound life of
man, particularly in the private and erotic part of his life. 1
The second volume of Main Currents is called The Romantic Revolution in America and it is natural to expect that
the word romantic should appear in it frequently. So it does*
more frequently than one can count, and seldom with the
same meaning, seldom with the sense that the word, although
i See, for example, how Parrington accounts for the "idealizing mind" Melville's by the discrepancy between "a wife in her morning kimono"
and
"the Helen of his dreams." Vol. n, p. 259.
6 The Liberal Imagination
scandalously vague as it has been used by the literary historians, is still full o complicated but not wholly pointless
ideas, that it involves many contrary but definable things; all
too often Parrington uses the word romantic with the word
romance close at hand, meaning a romance, in the sense that
Graustark or Treasure Island is a romance, as though it
signified chiefly a gay disregard of the limitations of everyday
fact. Romance is refusing to heed the counsels of experience
p. iii); it is ebullience (p. iv); it is utopianism (p. iv); it is
individualism (p. vi); it is self-deception (p. 59) "romantic
faith ... in the beneficent processes of trade and industry"
(as held, we inevitably ask, by the romantic Adam Smith?); it
is the love of the picturesque (p. 49); it is the dislike of innovation (p. 50) but also the love of change (p. iv); it is the sentimental (p. 192); it is patriotism, and then it is cheap (p. 235).
It may be used to denote what is not classical, but chiefly it
means that which ignores reality (pp. ix, 136, 143, 147, and
passim); it is not critical (pp. 225, 235), although in speaking
of Cooper and Melville, Parrington admits that criticism can
sometimes spring from romanticism.
Whenever a man with whose ideas he disagrees wins from
Parrington a reluctant measure of respect, the word romantic is likely to appear. He does not admire Henry Clay, yet
something in Clay is not to be despised his romanticism,
although Clay's romanticism is made equivalent with his
inability to "come to grips with reality." Romanticism is thus,
in most of its significations, the venial sin of Main Currents;
like carnal passion in the Inferno, it evokes not blame but
tender sorrow. But it can also be the great and saving virtue
which Parrington recognizes. It is ascribed to the transcendental reformers he so much admires; it is said to mark two
of his most cherished heroes, Jefferson and Emerson: "they
were both romantics and their idealism was only a different
expression of a common spirit." Parrington held, we may say,
at least two different views of romanticism which suggest two
Reality in America >j
different views of reality. Sometimes he speaks of reality in
an honorific way, meaning the substantial stuff of life, the
ineluctable facts with which the rnind must cope, but sometimes he speaks of it pejoratively and means the world of established social forms; and he speaks of realism in two ways:
sometimes as the power of dealing intelligently with fact,
sometimes as a cold and conservative resistance to idealism.
Just as for Parrington there is a saving grace and a venial
sin, there is also a deadly sin, and this is turning away from
reality, not in the excess of generous feeling, but in what he
believes to be a deficiency of feeling, as with Hawthorne, or
out of what amounts to sinful pride, as with Henry James. He
tells us that there was too much realism in Hawthorne to allow him to give his faith to the transcendental reformers:
"he was too much of a realist to change fashions in creeds";
"he remained cold to the revolutionary criticism that was
eager to pull down the old temples to make room for nobler."
It is this cold realism, keeping Hawthorne apart from his enthusiastic contemporaries, that alienates Parrington's sympathy "Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose
to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but
evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the
heart, Utopia is only the shadow of a dream. And so while the
Concord thinkers were proclaiming man to be the indubitable child of God, Hawthorne was critically examining the
question of evil as it appeared in the light of his own experi-
ence. It was the central fascinating problem of his intellectual life, and in pursuit of a solution he probed curiously
into the hidden, furtive recesses of the soul." Parrington's
disapproval of the enterprise is unmistakable.
Now we might wonder whether Hawthorne's questioning
of the nai've and often eccentric faiths of the transcendental
reformers was not, on the face of it, a public service. But Parrington implies that it contributes nothing to democracy, and
even that it stands in the way of the realization of democracy.
8 The Liberal Imagination
If democracy depends wholly on a fighting faith, I suppose
he is right. Yet society is after all something that exists at the
moment as well as in the future, and if one man wants to
probe curiously into the hidden furtive recesses of the contemporary soul, a broad democracy and especially one devoted
to reality should allow him to do so without despising him.
If what Hawthorne did was certainly nothing to build a party
on, we ought perhaps to forgive him when we remember that
he was only one man and that the future of mankind did not
depend upon him alone. But this very fact serves only to
irritate Parrington; he is put out by Hawthorne's loneliness
and believes that part of Hawthorne's insufficiency as a writer
comes from his failure to get around and meet people. Hawthorne could not, he tells us, establish contact with the "Yankee reality/' and was scarcely aware of the "substantial world
of Puritan reality that Samuel Sewall knew."
To turn from reality might mean to turn to romance, but
Parrington tells us that Hawthorne was romantic "only in a
narrow and very special sense." He was not interested in the
world of, as it were, practical romance, in the Salem of the
clipper ships; from this he turned away to create "a romance
of ethics." This is not an illuminating phrase but it is a catching one, and it might be taken to mean that Hawthorne was
in the tradition of, say, Shakespeare; but we quickly learn
that, no, Hawthorne had entered a barren field, for although
he himself lived in the present and had all the future to mold,
he preferred to find many of his subjects in the past. We learn
too that his romance of ethics is not admirable because it requires the hard, fine pressing of ideas, and we are told that
"a romantic uninterested in adventure and afraid of sex is
likely to become somewhat graveled for matter." In short,
Hawthorne's mind was a thin one, and Parrington puts in
evidence his use of allegory and symbol and the very severity
and precision of his art to prove that he suffered from a sadly
limited intellect, for so much fancy and so much art could
Reality in America 9
scarcely be needed unless the writer were trying to exploit to
the utmost the few poor ideas that he had.
Hawthorne, then, was "forever dealing with shadows, and
he knew that he was dealing with shadows." Perhaps so, but
shadows are also part of reality and one would not want a
world without shadows, it would not even be a "real" world.
But we must get beyond Parrington's metaphor. The fact is
that Hawthorne was dealing beautifully with realities, with
substantial things. The man who could raise those brilliant
and serious doubts about the nature and possibility of moral
perfection, the man who could keep himself aloof from the
"Yankee reality" and who could dissent from the orthodoxies
of dissent and tell us so much about the nature of moral
zeal, is of course dealing exactly with reality.
Parrington's characteristic weakness as a historian is suggested by his title, for the culture of a nation is not truly
figured in the image of the current. A culture is not a flow,
nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle,
or at least debate it is nothing if not a dialectic. And in any
culture there are likely to be certain artists who contain a
large part of the dialectic within themselves, their meaning
and power lying in their contradictions; they contain within
themselves, it may be said, the very essence of the culture, and
the sign of this is that they do not submit to serve the ends
of any one ideological group or tendency. It is a significant
circumstance of American culture, and one which is susceptible of explanation, that an unusually large proportion of
its notable writers of the nineteenth century were such repositories of the dialectic of their times they contained both
the yes and the no of their culture, and by that token they
were prophetic of the future. Parrington said that he had
not set up shop as a literary critic; but if a literary critic is
simply a reader who has the ability to understand literature
and to convey to others what he understands, it is not exactly
a matter of free choice whether or not a cultural historian shall
io The Liberal Imagination
be a literary critic, nor is it open to him to let his virtuous
political and social opinions do duty for percipience. To
throw out Poe because he cannot be conveniently fitted into
a theory of American culture, to speak of him as a biological
sport and as a mind apart from the main current, to find his
gloom to be merely personal and eccentric, "only the atrabilious wretchedness of a dipsomaniac," as Hawthorne's was
"no more than the skeptical questioning of life by a nature
that knew no fierce storms," to judge Melville's response to
American life to be less noble than that of Bryant or of
Greeley, to speak of Henry James as an escapist, as an artist
similar to Whistler, a man characteristically afraid of stress
this is not merely to be mistaken in aesthetic judgment;
rather it is to examine without attention and from the point
of view of a limited and essentially arrogant conception of
reality the documents which are in some respects the most
suggestive testimony to what America was and is, and of
course to get no answer from them.
Parrington lies twenty years behind us, and in the intervening time there has developed a body of opinion which is aware
of his inadequacies and of the Inadequacies of his coadjutors
and disciples, who make up what might be called the literary
academicism of liberalism. Yet Parrington still stands at the
center of American thought about American culture because,
as I say, he expresses the chronic American belief that there
exists an opposition between reality and mind and that one
must enlist oneself in the party of reality.
11
This belief in the incompatibility of mind and reality Is
exemplified by the doctrinaire indulgence xvhich liberal intellectuals have always displayed toward Theodore Dreiser,
an indulgence which becomes the worthier of remark when
it is contrasted with the liberal severity toward Henry James.
Reality in America n
Dreiser and James: with that juxtaposition we are immediately at the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and
politics meet. One does not go there gladly, but nowadays
it is not exactly a matter of free choice whether one does
or does not go. As for the particular juxtaposition itself, it
is inevitable and it has at the present moment far more significance than the juxtaposition which once used to be made
between James and Whitman. It is not hard to contrive factitious oppositions between James and Whitman, but the real
difference between them is the difference between the moral
mind, with its awareness of tragedy, irony, and multitudinous
distinctions, and the transcendental mind, with its passionate
sense of the oneness of multiplicity. James and Whitman are
unlike not in quality but in kind, and in their very opposition they serve to complement each other. But the difference
between James and Dreiser is not of kind, for both men addressed themselves to virtually the same social and moral
fact. The difference here is one of quality, and perhaps nothing is more typical of American liberalism than the way it has
responded to the respective qualities of the two men.
Few critics, I suppose, no matter what their political disposition, have ever been wholly blind to James's great gifts,
or even to the grandiose moral intention of these gifts. And
few critics have ever been wholly blind to Dreiser's great
faults. But by liberal critics James is traditionally put to the
ultimate question: of what use, of what actual political use,
are his gifts and their intention? Granted that James was devoted to an extraordinary moral perceptiveness, granted too
that moral perceptiveness has something to do with politics
and the social life, of what possible practical value in our
world of impending disaster can James's work be? And James's
style, his characters, his subjects, and even his own social origin
and the manner of his personal life are adduced to show that
his work cannot endure the question. To James no quarter is
given by American criticism in its political and liberal aspect.
12 The Liberal Imagination
But in the same degree that liberal criticism is moved by
political considerations to treat James with severity, it treats
Dreiser with the most sympathetic indulgence. Dreiser's literary faults, it gives us to understand, are essentially social
and political virtues. It was Parrington who established the
formula for the liberal criticism of Dreiser by calling him a
"peasant": when Dreiser thinks stupidly, it is because he has
the slow stubbornness of a peasant; when he writes badly,
it is because he is impatient of the sterile literary gentility of
the bourgeoisie. It is as if wit, and flexibility of mind, and
perception, and knowledge were to be equated with aristocracy and political reaction, while dullness and stupidity must
naturally suggest a virtuous democracy, as in the old plays.
The liberal judgment of Dreiser and James goes back of
politics, goes back to the cultural assumptions that make
politics. We are still haunted by a kind of political fear of
the intellect which Tocqueville observed in us more than a
century ago. American intellectuals, when they are being,
consciously American or political, are remarkably quick to
suggest that an art which is marked by perception and knowledge, although all very well in its way, can never get us
through gross dangers and difficulties. And their misgivings,
become the more intense when intellect works in art as it
ideally should, when its processes are vivacious and interesting and brilliant. It is then that we like to confront it with
the gross dangers and difficulties and to challenge it to save
us at once from disaster. When intellect in art is awkward or
dull we do not put it to the test of ultimate or immediate
practicality. No liberal critic asks the question of Dreiser
whether his moral preoccupations are going to be useful in
confronting the disasters that threaten us. And it is a judgment on the proper nature of mind, rather than any actual
political meaning that might be drawn from the works of
the two men, which accounts for the unequal justice they
have received from the progressive critics. If it could be con-
Reality in America 13
clusively demonstrated by, say, documents In James's handwriting that James explicitly intended his books to be understood as pleas for co-operatives, labor unions, better housing, and more equitable taxation, the American critic in
his liberal and progressive character would still be worried by
James because his work shows so many of the electric qualities of mind. And if something like the opposite were proved
of Dreiser, it would be brushed aside as his doctrinaire antiSemitism has in fact been brushed aside because his books
have the awkwardness, the chaos, the heaviness which we associate with "reality." In the American metaphysic, reality
is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. And that mind is alone felt to be trustworthy which most resembles this reality by most nearly reproducing the sensations it affords.
In The Rise of American Civilization, Professor Beard
uses a significant phrase when, in the course of an ironic
account of James's career, he implies that we have the clue
to the irrelevance of that career when we know that James
was "a whole generation removed from the odors of the
shop." Of a piece with this, and in itself even more significant, is the comment which Granville Hicks makes in The
Great Tradition when he deals with James's stories about
artists and remarks that such artists as James portrays, so concerned for their art and their integrity in art, do not really
exist: "After all, who has ever known such artists? Where are
the Hugh Verekers, the Mark Ambients, the Neil Paradays, the
Overts, Limberts, Dencombes, Delavoys?" This question, as
Mr. Hicks admits, had occurred to James himself, but what
answer had James given to it? "If the life about us for the last
thirty years refused warrant for these examples," he said in
the preface to volume xn of the New York Edition, "then so
much the worse for that life. . . . There are decencies that
in the name of the general self-respect we must take for
granted, there's a rudimentary intellectual honor to which
14 The Liberal Imagination
we must, in the interest of civilization, at least pretend." And
to this Mr. Hicks, shocked beyond argument, makes this reply, which would be astonishing had we not heard it before:
"But this is the purest romanticism, this writing about what
ought to be rather than what is!"
The "odors of the shop" are real, and to those who breathe
them they guarantee a sense of vitality from which James is
debarred. The idea of intellectual honor is not real, and to
that chimera James was devoted. He betrayed the reality o
what is in the interests of what ought to be. Dare we trust
him? The question, we remember, is asked by men who themselves have elaborate transactions with what ought to be.
Professor Beard spoke in the name of a growing, developing,
and improving America. Mr. Flicks, when he wrote The
Great Tradition, was in general sympathy with a nominally
radical movement. But James's own transaction with what
ought to be is suspect because it is carried on through what
I have called the electrical qualities of mind, through a complex and rapid imagination and with a kind of authoritative
immediacy. Mr. Hicks knows that Dreiser is "clumsy" and
"stupid" and "bewildered" and "crude in his statement of
materialistic monism"; he knows that Dreiser in his personal
life which is in point because James's personal life is always supposed to be so much in point was not quite emancipated from "his boyhood longing for crass material success," showing "again and again a desire for the ostentatious
luxury of the successful business man." But Dreiser is to be
accepted and forgiven because his faults are the sad, lovable,
honorable faults of reality itself, or of America itself huge,
inchoate, struggling toward expression, caught between the
dream of raw power and the dream of morality.
"The liability in what Santayana called the genteel tradition was due to its being the product of mind apart from
experience. Dreiser gave us the stuff of our common experi-
ence, not as it was hoped to be by any idealizing theorist,
Reality in America 15
but as it actually was in its crudity." The author of this statement certainly cannot be accused of any lack of feeling for
mind as Henry James represents it; nor can Mr. Matthiessen
be thought of as a follower of Parrington indeed, in the
preface to American Renaissance he has framed one of the
sharpest and most cogent criticisms of Parrington's method.
Yet Mr. Matthiessen, writing in the New York Times Book
Review about Dreiser's posthumous novel, The Bulwark, accepts the liberal cliche which opposes crude experience to
mind and establishes Dreiser's value by implying that the
mind which Dreiser's crude experience is presumed to confront and refute is the mind of gentility.
This implied amalgamation of mind with gentility is the
rationale of the long indulgence of Dreiser, which is extended even to the style of his prose. Everyone is aware that
Dreiser's prose style is full of roughness and ungainliness,
and the critics who admire Dreiser tell us it does not matter.
Of course it does not matter. No reader with a right sense of
style would suppose that it does matter, and he might even
find it a virtue. But it has been taken for granted that the
ungainliness of Dreiser's style is the only possible objection to
be made to it, and that whoever finds in it any fault at all wants
a prettified genteel style (and is objecting to the ungainliness
of reality itself). For instance, Edwin Berry Burgum, in a
leaflet on Dreiser put out by the Book Find Club, tells us that
Dreiser was one of those who used or, as Mr. Burgum says,
utilized "the diction of the Middle West, pretty much as
it was spoken, rich in colloquialism and frank in the simplicity and directness of the pioneer tradition," and that this
diction took the place of "the literary English, formal and
bookish, of New England provincialism that was closer to
the aristocratic spirit of the mother country than to the tang
of everyday life in the new West." This is mere fantasy. Haw-
thorne, Thoreau, and Emerson were for the most part remarkably colloquial they wrote, that is, much as they spoke;
i6 The Liberal Imagination
their prose was specifically American in quality, and, except
for occasional lapses, quite direct and simple. It is Dreiser
who lacks the sense of colloquial diction that of the Middle West or any other If we are to talk of bookishness, it is
Dreiser who is bookish; he is precisely literary in the bad
sense; he is full of flowers of rhetoric and shines with paste
gems; at hundreds of points his diction is not only genteel
but fancy. It is he who speaks of "a scene more distingue than
this/' or of a woman ' 'artistic in form and feature," or of a
man who, although "strong, reserved, aggressive, with an air
of wealth and experience, was soi-disant and not particularly
eager to stay at home." Colloquialism held no real charm for
him and his natural tendency is always toward the "fine:"
.... Moralists come and go; religionists fulminate and declare
the pronouncements of God as to this; but Aphrodite still reigns.
Embowered in the festal depths of the spring, set above her altars
of porphyry, chalcedony, ivory and gold, see her smile the smile
that is at once the texture and essence of delight, the glory and
despair of the world! Dream on, oh Buddha, asleep on your lotus
leaf, of an undisturbed Nirvana! Sweat, oh Jesus, your last agonizing drops over an unregenerate world! In the forests of Pan still
ring the cries of the worshippers of Aphrodite! From her altars
the incense of adoration ever rises! And see, the new red grapes
dripping where votive hands new-press them!
Charles Jackson, the novelist, telling us in the same leaflet
that Dreiser's style does not matter, remarks on how much
still comes to us when we have lost by translation the stylistic
brilliance of Thomas Mann or the Russians or Balzac. He
is in part right. And he is right too when he says that a certain kind of conscious, supervised artistry is not appropriate
to the novel of large dimensions. Yet the fact is that the great
novelists have usually written very good prose, and what
comes through even a bad translation is exactly the power of
mind that made the well-hung sentence of the original text.
In literature style is so little the mere clothing of thought
Reality in America 1*7
need it be insisted on at this late date? that we may say that
from the earth of the novelist's prose spring his characters,
his ideas, and even his story itself. 2
To the extent that Dreiser's style is defensible, his thought
is also defensible. That is, when he thinks like a novelist, he
is worth following when by means of his rough and ungainly
but no doubt cumulatively effective style he creates rough,
ungainly, but effective characters and events. But when he
thinks like, as we say, a philosopher, he is likely to be not
only foolish but vulgar. He thinks as the modern crowd
thinks when it decides to think: religion and morality are
nonsense, "religionists'* and moralists are fakes, tradition is
a fraud, what is man but matter and impulses, mysterious
"chemisms," what value has life anyway? "What, cooking,
eating, coition, job holding, growing, aging, losing, winning, in so changeful and passing a scene as this, important? .
Bunkl It is some form of titillating illusion with about as
much import to the superior forces that bring it all about as
the functions and gyrations of a fly. No more. And maybe
less." Thus Dreiser at sixty. And yet there is for him always
the vulgarly saving suspicion that maybe, when all is said
2 The latest defense of Dreiser's style, that in the chapter on Dreiser in
the
Literary History of the United States, is worth noting: "Forgetful of the
integrity and power of Dreiser's whole work, many critics have been
distracted
into a condemnation of his style. He was, like Twain and Whitman, an
organic
artist; he wrote what he knew what he was. His many colloquialisms
were
part of the coinage of his time, and his sentimental and romantic
passages
were written in the language of the educational system and the popular
literature of his formative years. In his style, as in his material, he was a child
of
his time, of his class. Self-educated, a type or model of the artist of
plebeian
origin in America, his language, like his subject matter, is not marked by
internal inconsistencies," No doubt Dreiser was an organic artist in the
sense
that he wrote what he knew and what he was, but so, I suppose, is
every artist;
the question for criticism comes down to what he knew and what he
was.
That he was a child of his time and class is also true, but this can be said
of everyone without exception; the question for criticism is how he
transcended
the imposed limitations of his time and class. As for the defense made
on the
ground of his particular class, it can only be said that liberal thought has
come
to a strange pass when it assumes that a plebeian origin is accountable
for a
writer's faults through all his intellectual life.
i8 The Liberal Imagination
and done, there is Something Behind It All. It is much to
the point of his intellectual vulgarity that Dreiser's antiSemitism was not merely a social prejudice but an idea, a
way of dealing with difficulties.
No one, I suppose, has ever represented Dreiser as a masterly intellect. It is even commonplace to say that his ideas
are inconsistent or inadequate. But once that admission has
been made, his ideas are hustled out of sight while his "reality" and great brooding pity are spoken of. (His pity is to
be questioned: pity is to be judged by kind, not amount,
and Dreiser's pity Jennie Gerhardt provides the only ex-
ception is either destructive of its object or it is self-pity.)
Why has no liberal critic ever brought Dreiser's ideas to the
bar of political practicality, asking what use is to be made
of Dreiser's dim, awkward speculation, of his self-justification,
of his lust for "beauty" and "sex" and "living" and "life itself/' and of the showy nihilism which always seems to him
so grand a gesture in the direction of profundity? We live,
understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock,
like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the
legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always
a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late
for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought,
never too late for naive moralizing. We seern to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them
against the exigency of time.
But sometimes time is not quite so exigent as to justify all
our own exigency, and in the case of Dreiser time has allowed his deficiencies to reach their logical, and fatal, conclu-
sion. In The Bulwark Dreiser's characteristic ideas come full
circle, and the simple, didactic life history of Solon Barnes,
a Quaker business man, affirms a simple Christian faith, and
a kind of practical mysticism, and the virtues of self-abnegation and self-restraint, and the belief in and submission to
Reality in America ig
the hidden purposes of higher powers, those "superior forces
that bring it all about" once, in Dreiser's opinion, so brutally indifferent, now somehow benign. This is not the first
occasion on which Dreiser has shown a tenderness toward
religion and a responsiveness to mysticism. Jennie Gerhardt
and the figure of the Reverend Duncan McMillan in An
American Tragedy are forecasts of the avowals of The Buiwarkj and Dreiser's lively interest in power of any sort led him
to take account of the power implicit in the cruder forms of
mystical performance. Yet these rifts in his nearly monolithic
materialism cannot quite prepare us for the blank pietism
of The Bulwark) not after we have remembered how salient
in Dreiser's work has been the long surly rage against the
"religionists" and the "moralists," the men who have presumed to believe that life can be given any law at all and who
have dared to suppose that will or mind or faith can shape
the savage and beautiful entity that Dreiser liked to call "life
itself/' Now for Dreiser the law may indeed be given, and it
is wholly simple the safe conduct of the personal life requires only that we follow the Inner Light according to the
regimen of the Society of Friends, or according to some other
godly rule. And now. the smiling Aphrodite set above her
altars of porphyry, chalcedony, ivory, and gold is quite forgotten, and we are told that the sad joy of cosmic acceptance
goes hand in hand with sexual abstinence.
Dreiser's mood of "acceptance" in the last years of his
life is not, as a personal experience, to be submitted to the
tests of intellectual validity. It consists of a sensation of cosmic
understanding, of an overarching sense of unity with the
world in its apparent evil as well as in its obvious good. It
is no more to be quarreled with, or reasoned with, than love
itself indeed, it is a kind of love, not so much of the world
as of oneself in the world. Perhaps it is either the cessation of
desire or the perfect balance of desires. It is what used often
to be meant by "peace," and up through the nineteenth cen-
2O The Liberal Imagination
tury a good many people understood its meaning. If it was
Dreiser's own emotion at the end of his life, who would not
be happy that he had achieved it? I am not even sure that our
civilization would not be the better for more of us knowing
and desiring this emotion of grave felicity. Yet granting the
personal validity of the emotion, Dreiser's exposition of it
fails, and is, moreover, offensive. Mr. Matthiessen has warned
us of the attack that will be made on the doctrine of The Bulwark by "those who believe that any renewal of Christianity
marks a new 'failure of nerve/ " But Dreiser's religious avowal
is not a failure of nerve it is a failure of mind and heart. We
have only to set his book beside any work in which mind and
heart are made to serve religion to know this at once. Ivan
Karamazov's giving back his ticket of admission to the ' 'harmony" of the universe suggests that The Bulwark is not morally adequate, for we dare not, as its hero does, blandly "accept"
the suffering of others; and the Book of Job tells us that it does
not include enough in its exploration of the problem of evil,
and is not stern enough. I have said that Dreiser's religious
affirmation was offensive; the offense lies in the vulgar ease of
its formulation, as well as in the comfortable untroubled way
in which Dreiser moved from nihilism to pietism. 3
The Bulwark is the fruit of Dreiser's old age, but if we
speak of it as a failure of thought and feeling, we cannot suppose that with age Dreiser weakened in mind and heart. The
weakness was always there. And in a sense it is not Dreiser
who failed but a whole way of dealing with ideas, a way in
which we have all been in some degree involved. Our liberal,
progressive culture tolerated Dreiser's vulgar materialism
with its huge negation, its simple cry of "Bunk!," feeling
s This ease and comfortableness seem to mark contemporary religious
conversions. Religion nowadays has the appearance of what the ideal
modern house
has been called, "a machine for living/" and seemingly one makes up
one's
mind to acquire and use it not with spiritual struggle but only with a
growing
sense of its practicability and convenience. Compare The Seven Storey
Mountain,
which Monsignor Sheen calls "a twentieth-century form of the
Confessions of
St. Augustine/' with the old, the as it were original, Confessions o St.
Augustine.
Reality in America %\
that perhaps it was not quite intellectually adequate but certainly very strong, certainly very real. And now, almost as a
natural consequence, it has been given, and is not unwilling
to take, Dreiser's pietistic religion in all its inadequacy.
Dreiser, of course, was firmer than the intellectual culture
that accepted him. He meant his ideas, at least so far as a man
can mean ideas who is incapable of following them to their
consequences. But we, when it came to his ideas, talked about
his great brooding pity and shrugged the ideas off. We are
still doing it. Robert Elias, the biographer of Dreiser, tells
us that "it is part of the logic of [Dreiser's] life that he should
have completed The Bulwark at the same time that he joined
the Communists." Just what kind of logic this is we learn
from Mr. Elias's further statement. "When he supported leftwing movements and finally, last year, joined the Communist
Party, he did so not because he had examined the details of
the party line and found them satisfactory, but because he
agreed with a general program that represented a means for
establishing his cherished goal of greater equality among
men." Whether or not Dreiser was following the logic of his
own life, he was certainly following the logic of the liberal
criticism that accepted him so undiscriminatingly as one of
the great, significant expressions of its spirit. This is the liberal criticism, in the direct line of Parrington, which establishes the social responsibility of the writer and then goes on
to say that, apart from his duty of resembling reality as much
as possible, he is not really responsible for anything, not even
for his ideas. The scope of reality being what it is, ideas are held
to be mere "details," and, what is more, to be details which, if
attended to, have the effect of diminishing reality. But ideals
are different from ideas; in the liberal criticism which descends
from Parrington ideals consort happily with reality and they
urge us to deal impatiently with ideas a "cherished goal"
forbids that we stop to consider how we reach it, or if we may
not destroy it in trying to reach it the wrong way.
Sherwood Anderson
I find it hard, and I think it would be false, to write about
Sherwood Anderson without speaking of him personally and
even emotionally. I did not know him; I was in his company
only twice and on neither occasion did I talk with him. The
first time I saw him was when he was at the height of his
fame; I had, I recall, just been reading A Story-Teller's Story
and Tar, and these autobiographical works had made me fully
aware of the change that had taken place in my feelings since
a few years before when almost anything that Anderson wrote
had seemed a sort of revelation. The second time was about
two years before his death; he had by then not figured in my
own thought about literature for many years, and I believe
that most people were no longer aware of him as an immediate
force in their lives. His last two novels (Beyond Desire in
1932 and Kit Brandon in 1936) had not been good; they were
all too clearly an attempt to catch up with the world, but the
world had moved too fast; it was not that Anderson was not
aware of the state of things but rather that he had suffered the
fate of the writer who at one short past moment has had a
success with a simple idea which he allowed to remain simple and to become fixed. On both occasions the first being
a gathering, after one of Anderson's lectures, of eager Wisconsin graduate students and of young instructors who were
a little worried that they would be thought stuffy and academic by this Odysseus, the first famous man of letters most
of us had ever seen; the second being a crowded New York
party I was much taken by Anderson's human quality, by
Sherwood Anderson 23
a certain serious interest he would have in the person he was
shaking hands with or talking to for a brief, formal moment,
by a certain graciousness or gracefulness which seemed to
arise from an innocence of heart.
I mention this very tenuous personal impression because
it must really have arisen not at all from my observation of
the moment but rather have been projected from some unconscious residue o admiration I had for Anderson's books
even after I had made all my adverse judgments upon them.
It existed when I undertook this notice of Anderson on the
occasion of his death, or else I should not have undertaken it.
And now that I have gone back to his books again and have
found that I like them even less than I remembered, I find too
that the residue of admiration still remains; it is quite vague,
yet it requires to be articulated with the clearer feelings of
dissatisfaction; and it needs to be spoken of, as it has been, first.
There is a special poignancy in the failure of Anderson's
later career. According to the artistic morality to which he
and his friends subscribed Robert Browning seems to have
played a large if anonymous part in shaping it Anderson
should have been forever protected against artistic failure by
the facts of his biography. At the age of forty-five, as everyone knows, he found himself the manager of a small paint
factory in Elyria, Ohio; one day, in the very middle of a sentence he was dictating, he walked out of the factory and gave
himself to literature and truth. From the wonder of that
escape he seems never to have recovered, and his continued
pleasure in it did him harm, for it seems to have made him
feel that the problem of the artist was defined wholly by the
struggle between sincerity on the one hand and commercialism and gentility on the other. He did indeed say that the
artist needed not only courage but craft, yet it was surely the
courage by which he set the most store. And we must sometimes feel that he had dared too much for his art and therefore expected too much merely from his boldness, believing
24 The Liberal Imagination
that right opinion must necessarily result from it. Anderson
was deeply concerned with the idea of justification; there was
an odd, quirky, undisciplined religious strain in him that
took this form; and he expected that although Philistia might
condemn him, he would have an eventual justification in the
way of art and truth. He was justified in some personal way, as
I have tried to say, and no doubt his great escape had something to do with this, but it also had the effect of fatally fixing
the character of his artistic life.
Anderson's greatest influence was probably upon those who
read him in adolescence, the age when we find the books we
give up but do not get over. And it now needs a little fortitude to pick up again, as many must have done upon the news
of his death, the one book of his we are all sure to have read,
for Winesburg, Ohio is not just a book, it is a personal souvenir. It is commonly owned in the Modern Library edition,
very likely in the most primitive format of that series, even
before it was tricked out with its vulgar little ballet-Prometheus; and the brown oilcloth binding, the coarse paper, the
bold type crooked on the page, are dreadfully evocative. Even
the introduction by Ernest Boyd is rank with the odor of the
past, of the day when criticism existed in heroic practical
simplicity, when it was all truth against hypocrisy, idealism
against philistinism, and the opposite of "romanticism" was
not "classicism" but "realism," which it now seems odd
negated both. As for the Wines burg stories themselves, they
are as dangerous to read again, as paining and as puzzling, as
if they were old letters we had written or received.
It is not surprising that Anderson should have made his
strongest appeal, although by no means his only one, to adolescents. For one thing, he wrote of young people with a
special tenderness; one of his best-known stories is called "I
Want To Know Why": it is the great adolescent question,
and the world Anderson saw is essentially, and even when it
is inhabited by adults, the world of the sensitive young per-
Sherwood Anderson 25
son. It is a world that does not "understand," a world of soli-
tude, of running away from home, of present dullness and faroff joy and eventual fulfillment; it is a world seen as suffused
by one's own personality and yet and therefore felt as indifferent to one's own personality. And Anderson used what
seems to a young person the very language to penetrate to
the heart of the world's mystery, what with its rural or primeval willingness to say things thrice over, its reiterated
"Well . . ." which suggests the groping of boyhood, its "Eh?"
which implies the inward-turning wisdom of old age.
Most of us will feel now that this world of Anderson's is a
pretty inadequate representation of reality and probably always was. But we cannot be sure that it was not a necessary
event in our history, like adolescence itself; and no one has
the adolescence he would have liked to have had. But an
adolescence must not continue beyond its natural term, and
as we read through Anderson's canon what exasperates us
is his stubborn, satisfied continuance in his earliest attitudes.
There is something undeniably impressive about the period
of Anderson's work in which he was formulating his character-
istic notions. We can take, especially if we have a modifying
consciousness of its historical moment, Windy MacPherson's
Son, despite its last part which is so curiously like a commercial magazine story of the time; Marching Men has power
even though its political mysticism is repellent; Winesburg,
Ohio has its touch of greatness; Poor White is heavy-handed
but not without its force; and some of the stories in The Triumph of the Egg have the kind of grim quaintness which is,
I think, Anderson's most successful mood, the mood that he
occasionally achieves now and then in his later short pieces,
such as "Death in the Woods." But after 1921, ir^Dark Laughter and Many Marriages, the books that made the greatest
critical stir, there emerges in Anderson's work the compulsive, obsessive, repetitive quality which finally impresses itself
on us as his characteristic quality.!
26 The Liberal Imagination
Anderson is connected with the tradition of the men who
maintain a standing quarrel with respectable society and have
a perpetual bone to pick with the rational intellect. It is a
very old tradition, for the Essenes, the early Franciscans, as
well as the early Hasidim, may be said to belong to it. In
modern times it has been continued by Blake and Whitman
and D. H. Lawrence. Those who belong to the tradition
usually do something more about the wrong way the world
goes than merely to denounce it they act out their denunciations and assume a role and a way of life. Typically they take
up their packs and leave the doomed respectable city, just as
Anderson did. But Anderson lacked what his spiritual colleagues have always notably had. We may call it mind, but
energy and spiritedness, in their relation to mind, will serve
just as well. Anderson never understood that the moment of
enlightenment and conversion the walking out cannot be
merely celebrated but must be developed, so that what begins
as an act of will grows to be an act of intelligence. The men of
the anti-rationalist tradition mock the mind's pretensions and
denounce its restrictiveness; but they are themselves the agents
of the most powerful thought. They do not of course really reject mind at all, but only mind as it is conceived by respectable
society. "I learned the Torah from all the limbs of my teacher,"
said one of the Hasidirn. They think with their sensations,
their emotions, and, some of them, with their sex. While denouncing intellect, they shine forth in a mental blaze of energy
which manifests itself in syntax, epigram, and true discovery.
Anderson is not like them in this regard. He did not become a "wise" man. He did not have the gift of being able to
throw out a sentence or a metaphor which suddenly illuminates some dark corner of life his role implied that he
should be full of "sayings" and specific insights, yet he never
was. But in the preface to Winesburg, Ohio he utters one
of the few really "wise" things in his work, and, by a kind of
irony, it explains something of his own inadequacy. The
Sherwood Anderson 27
preface consists of a little story about an old man who is writing what he calls "The Book of the Grotesque/' This is the old
man's ruling idea:
That in the beginning when the world was young there were a
great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the
truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many
vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were
all beautiful.
The old man listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not
try to tell you all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the
truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and
of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched
up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up
a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man
had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his
notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths
to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
Anderson snatched but a single one of the truths and it
made him, in his own gentle and affectionate meaning of
the word, a "grotesque"; eventually the truth itself became a
kind of falsehood. It was the truth or perhaps we must
call it a simple complex of truths of love-passion-freedom,
and it was made up of these "vague thoughts": that each individual is a precious secret essence, often discordant with
all other essences; that society, and more particularly the industrial society, threatens these essences; that the old good values of life have been destroyed by the industrial dispensation; that people have been cut off from each other and even
from themselves. That these thoughts make a truth is certain; and its importance is equally certain. In what way could
it have become a falsehood and its possessor a "grotesque"?
28 The Liberal Imagination
The nature o the falsehood seems to lie in this that Anderson's affirmation of life by love, passion, and freedom had,
paradoxically enough, the effect of quite negating life, making it gray, empty, and devoid of meaning. We are quite used
to hearing that this is what excessive intellection can do; we
are not so often warned that emotion, if it is of a certain
kind, can be similarly destructive. Yet when feeling is understood as an answer, a therapeutic, when it becomes a sort of
critical tool and is conceived of as excluding other activities of
life, it can indeed make the world abstract and empty. Love
and passion, when considered as they are by Anderson as a
means of attack upon the order of the respectable world, can
contrive a world which is actually without love and passion
and not worth being "free" in. 1
In Anderson's world there are many emotions, or rather
many instances of a few emotions, but there are very few
sights, sounds, and smells, very little of the stuff of actuality.
The very things to which he gives moral value because they
are living and real and opposed in their organic nature to the
insensate abstractness of an industrial culture become, as he
writes about them, themselves abstract and without life. His
praise of the racehorses he said he loved gives us no sense of
a horse; his Mississippi does not flow; his tall corn grows out
of the soil of his dominating subjectivity. The beautiful or-
i In the pretace of The Sherwood Anderson Reader, Paul Rosenfeld,
Anderson's friend and admirer, has summarized in a remarkable way the
vision of
life which Anderson's work suggests: "Almost, it seems, we touch an
absolute
existence, a curious semi-animal, semi-divine life. Its chronic state is
banality,
prostration, dismemberment, unconsciousness; tensity with indefinite
yearning
and infinitely stretching desire. Its manifestation: the non-community
of cranky
or otherwise asocial solitaries, dispersed, impotent and imprisoned. ...
Its
wonders the wonders of its chaos are fugitive heroes and heroines,
mutilated
like the dismembered Osiris, the dismembered Bionysius. . . . Painfully
the
absolute comes to itself in consciousness of universal feeling and
helplessness.
... It realizes itself as feeling, sincerity, understanding, as connection
and
unity; sometimes at the cost of the death of its creatures. It triumphs in
anyone aware of its existence even in its sullen state. The moment of
realization
is tragically brief. Feeling, understanding, unity pass. The divine life
sinks
back again, dismembered and unconscious."
Sherwood Anderson 29
ganic things of the world are made to be admirable not for
themselves but only for their moral superiority to men and
machines. There are many similarities of theme between Anderson and D. H. Lawrence, but Lawrence's far stronger and
more sensitive mind kept his faculty of vision fresh and true;
Lawrence had eyes for the substantial and even at his most
doctrinaire he knew the world of appearance.
And just as there is no real sensory experience in Anderson's writing, there is also no real social experience. His people do not really go to church or vote or work for money, although it is often said of them that they do these things. In
his desire for better social relationships Anderson could never
quite see the social relationships that do in fact exist, however inadequate they may be. He often spoke, for example, of
unhappy, desperate marriages and seemed to suggest that they
ought to be quickly dissolved, but he never understood that
marriages are often unsatisfactory for the very reasons that
make it impossible to dissolve them.
His people have passion without body, and sexuality without gaiety and joy, although it is often through sex that they
are supposed to find their salvation. John Jay Chapman said
of Emerson that, great as he was, a visitor from Mars would
learn less about life on earth from him than from Italian
opera, for the opera at least suggested that there were two
sexes. When Anderson was at the height of his reputation, it
seemed that his report on the existence of two sexes was the
great thing about him, the thing that made his work an advance over the literature of New England. But although the
visitor from Mars might be instructed by Anderson in the
mere fact of bisexuality, he would still be advised to go to
the Italian opera if he seeks fuller information. For from the
opera, as never from Anderson, he will acquire some of the
knowledge which is normally in the possession of natives of
the planet, such as that sex has certain manifestations which
are socially quite complex, that it is involved with religion,
go The Liberal Imagination
politics, and the fate of nations, above all that it is frequently
marked by the liveliest sort of energy.
In their speech his people have not only no wit, but no
idiom. To say that they are not "real" would be to introduce
all sorts of useless quibbles about the art of character creation; they are simply not there. This is not a failure of art;
rather, it would seem to have been part of Anderson's intention that they should be not there. His narrative prose is contrived to that end; it is not really a colloquial idiom, although
it has certain colloquial tricks; it approaches in effect the
inadequate use of a foreign language; old slang persists in it
and elegant archaisms are consciously used, so that people
are constantly having the "fantods," girls are frequently re-
ferred to as "maidens," and things are "like unto" other
things. These mannerisms, although they remind us of some
of Dreiser's, are not the result, as Dreiser's are, of an effort to
be literary and impressive. Anderson's prose has a purpose to
which these mannerisms are essential it has the intention of
making us doubt our familiarity with our own world, and not,
we must note, in order to make things fresher for us but only
in order to make them seem puzzling to us and remote from
us. When a man whose name we know is frequently referred
to as "the plowmaker," when we hear again and again of "a
kind of candy called Milky Way" long after we have learned, if
we did not already know, that Milky Way is a candy, when we
are told of someone that "He became a radical. He had radical
thoughts," it becomes clear that we are being asked by this
false naivete to give up our usual and on the whole useful
conceptual grasp of the world we get around in.
Anderson liked to catch people with their single human
secret, their essence, but the more he looks for their essence
the more his characters vanish into the vast limbo of meaning-
less life, the less they are human beings. His great American
heroes were Mark Twain and Lincoln, but when he writes
of these two shrewd, enduring men, he robs them of all their
Sherwood Anderson 31
savor and masculinity, of all their bitter resisting mind; they
become little more than a pair of sensitive, suffering happygo-luckies. The more Anderson says about people, the less alive
they become and the less lovable. Is it strange that, with all
Anderson's expressed affection for them, we ourselves can
never love the people he writes about? But of course we do
not love people for their essence or their souls, but for their
having a certain body, or wit, or idiom, certain specific relationships with things and other people, and for a dependable
continuity of existence: we love them for being there.
We can even for a moment entertain the thought that An-
derson himself did not love his characters, else he would not
have so thoroughly robbed them of substance and hustled
them so quickly off the stage after their small essential moments of crisis. Anderson's love, however, was real enough;
it is only that he loves under the aspect of his " truth"; it is
love indeed but love become wholly abstract. Another way
of putting it is that Anderson sees with the eyes of a religiosity
of a very limited sort. No one, I think, has commented on
the amount and quality of the mysticism that entered the
thought of the writers of the twenties. We may leave Willa
Gather aside, for her notion of Catholic order differentiates
her; but in addition to Anderson himself, Dreiser, Waldo
Frank, and Eugene O'Neill come to mind as men who had recourse to a strong but undeveloped sense of supernal powers.
It is easy enough to understand this crude mysticism as a
protest against philosophical and moral materialism; easy
enough, too, to forgive it, even when, as in Anderson, the
second births and the large revelations seem often to point
only to the bosom of a solemn bohemia, and almost always to
a lowering rather than a heightening of energy. We forgive
it because some part of the blame for its crudity must be
borne by the culture of the time. In Europe a century before, Stendhal could execrate a bourgeois materialism and
yet remain untempted by the dim religiosity which in Amer-
32 The Liberal Imagination
ica in the twenties seemed one of the likeliest of the few ways
by which one might affirm the value of spirit; but then Stendhal could utter his denunciation of philistinism in the
name of Mozart's music, the pictures of Cimabue, Masaccio,
Giotto, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, the plays of Corneille,
Racine, and Shakespeare. Of what is implied by these things
Anderson seems never to have had a real intimation. His
awareness of the past was limited, perhaps by his fighting faith
in the "modern," and this, in a modern, is always a danger.
His heroes in art and morality were few: Joyce, Lawrence,
Dreiser, and Gertrude Stein, as fellow moderns; Cellini, Turgeniev; there is a long piece in praise of George Borrow; he
spoke of Hawthorne with contempt, for he could not understand Hawthorne except as genteel, and he said of Henry
James that he was "the novelist of those who hate," for mind
seemed to him always a sort of malice. And he saw but faintly
even those colleagues in art whom he did admire. His real
heroes were the simple and unassuming, a few anonymous
Negroes, a few craftsmen, for he gave to the idea of craftsmanship a value beyond the value which it actually does have
it is this as much as anything else that reminds us of Hemingway's relation to Anderson and a few racing drivers of whom
Pop Geers was chief. It is a charming hero worship, but it does
not make an adequate antagonism to the culture which Anderson opposed, and in order to make it compelling and effective
Anderson reinforced it with what is in effect the high language
of religion, speaking of salvation, of the voice that will not be
denied, of dropping the heavy burden of this world.
The salvation that Anderson was talking about was no doubt
a real salvation, but it was small, and he used for it the language of the most strenuous religious experience. He spoke in
visions and mysteries and raptures, but what he was speaking
about after all was only the salvation of a small legitimate existence, of a quiet place in the sun and moments of leisurely
peace, of not being nagged and shrew-ridden, nor deprived of
Sherwood Anderson 33
one's due share of affection. What he wanted for himself and
others was perhaps no more than what he got in his last
years: a home, neighbors, a small daily work to do, and the
right to say his say carelessly and loosely and without the sense
of being strictly judged. But between this small, good life and
the language which he used about it there is a discrepancy
which may be thought of as a willful failure of taste, an intended lapse of the sense of how things fit. Wyndham Lewis, in
his attack in Paleface on the early triumphant Anderson,
speaks of Anderson's work as an assault on responsibility and
thoughtful maturity, on the pleasures and uses of the mind, on
decent human pride, on Socratic clarity and precision; and certainly when we think of the ' 'marching men" of Anderson's
second novel, their minds lost in their marching and singing,
leaving to their leader the definitions of their aims, we have
what might indeed be the political consequences of Anderson's
attitudes if these were carried out to their ultimate implications. Certainly the precious essence of personality to which
Anderson was so much committed could not be preserved by
any of the people or any of the deeds his own books delight in.
But what hostile critics forget about Anderson is that the
cultural situation from which his writing sprang was actually
much as he described it. Anderson's truth may have become a
falsehood in his hands by reason of limitations in himself or
in the tradition of easy populism he chose as his own, but one
has only to take it out of his hands to see again that it is indeed
a truth. The small legitimate existence, so necessary for the
majority of men to achieve, is in our age so very hard, so nearly
impossible, for them to achieve. The language Anderson used
was certainly not commensurate with the traditional value
which literature gives to the things he wanted, but it is not
incommensurate with the modern difficulty of attaining these
things. And it is his unending consciousness of this difficulty
that constitutes for me the residue of admiration for him that
I find I still have.
Freud and Literature
The Freudian psychology is the only systematic account of the
human mind which, in point of subtlety and complexity, of
interest and tragic power, deserves to stand beside the chaotic
mass of psychological insights which literature has accumulated through the centuries. To pass from the reading of a
great literary work to a treatise of academic psychology is to
pass from one order of perception to another, but the human
nature of the Freudian psychology is exactly the stuff upon
which the poet has always exercised his art. It is therefore not
surprising that the psychoanalytical theory has had a great effect upon literature. Yet the relationship is reciprocal, and the
effect of Freud upon literature has been no greater than the
effect of literature upon Freud. When, on the occasion of the
celebration of his seventieth birthday, Freud was greeted as
the "discoverer of the unconscious/' he corrected the speaker
and disclaimed the title. "The poets and philosophers before
me discovered the unconscious/' he said. "What I discovered
was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be
studied."
A lack of specific evidence prevents us from considering the
particular literary "influences" upon the founder of psychoanalysis; and, besides, when we think of the men who so clearly
anticipated many of Freud's own ideas Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche, for example and then learn that he did not read
their works until after he had formulated his own theories, we
34
Freud and Literature 35
must see that particular Influences cannot be in question here
but that what we must deal with is nothing less than a whole
Zeitgeist, a direction of thought. For psychoanalysis is one o
the culminations of the Romanticist literature of the nineteenth century. If there is perhaps a contradiction in the idea
of a science standing upon the shoulders of a literature which
avows itself inimical to science in so many ways, the contradiction will be resolved if we remember that this literature, despite its avowals, was itself scientific in at least the sense of
being passionately devoted to a research into the self.
In showing the connection between Freud and this Romanticist tradition, it is difficult to know where to begin, but there
might be a certain aptness in starting even back of the tradi-
tion, as far back as 1762 with Diderot's Rameau' s Nephew. At
any rate, certain men at the heart of nineteenth-century
thought were agreed in finding a peculiar importance in this
brilliant little work: Goethe translated it, Marx admired it,
Hegel as Marx reminded Engels in the letter which announced that he was sending the book as a gift praised and
expounded it at length, Shaw was impressed by it, and Freud
himself, as we know from a quotation in his Introductory
Lectures., read it with the pleasure of agreement.
The dialogue takes place between Diderot himself and a
nephew of the famous composer. The protagonist, the younger
Rameau, is a despised, outcast, shameless fellow; Hegel calls
him the "disintegrated consciousness" and credits him with
great wit, for it is he who breaks down all the normal social
values and makes new combinations with the pieces. As for
Diderot, the deuteragonist, he is what Hegel calls the "honest
consciousness," and Hegel considers him reasonable, decent,
and dull. It is quite clear that the author does not despise his
Rameau and does not mean us to. Rameau is lustful and
greedy, arrogant yet self-abasing, perceptive yet "wrong," like
a child. Still, Diderot seems actually to be giving the fellow a
kind of superiority over himself, as though Rameau represents
36 The Liberal Imagination
the elements which, dangerous but wholly necessary, lie beneath the reasonable decorum of social life. It would perhaps
be pressing too far to find in Rameau Freud's id and in Diderot
Freud's ego; yet the connection does suggest itself; and at least
we have here the perception which is to be the common characteristic of both Freud and Romanticism, the perception of
the hidden element of human nature and of the opposition
between the hidden and the visible. We have too the bold perception of just what lies hidden: "If the little savage [i.e., the
child] were left to himself, if he preserved all his foolishness
and combined the violent passions of a man of thirty with the
lack of reason of a child in the cradle, he'd wring his father's
neck and go to bed with his mother."
From the self-exposure of Rameau to Rousseau's account of
his own childhood is no great step; society might ignore or
reject the idea of the "immorality" which lies concealed in the
beginning of the career of the "good" man, just as it might
turn away from Blake struggling to expound a psychology
which would include the forces beneath the propriety of social
man in general, but the idea of the hidden thing went forward
to become one of the dominant notions of the age. The hidden
element takes many forms and it is not necessarily "dark" and
"bad"; for Blake the "bad" was the good, while for Wordsworth and Burke what was hidden and unconscious was wisdom and power, which work in despite of the conscious intellect.
The mind has become far less simple; the devotion to the
various forms of autobiography itself an important fact in
the tradition provides abundant examples of the change that
has taken place. Poets, making poetry by what seems to them
almost a freshly discovered faculty, find that this new power
may be conspired against by other agencies of the mind and
even deprived of its freedom; the names of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Arnold at once occur to us again, and Freud quotes
Schiller on the danger to the poet that lies in the merely ana-
Freud and Literature 37
lytical reason. And it is not only the poets who are threatened;
educated and sensitive people throughout Europe become
aware of the depredations that reason might make upon the
affective life, as in the classic instance of John Stuart Mill.
We must also take into account the preoccupation it began in the eighteenth century, or even in the seventeenth
with children, women, peasants, and savages, whose mental
life, it is felt, is less overlaid than that of the educated adult
male by the proprieties of social habit. With this preoccupa-
tion goes a concern with education and personal development,
so consonant with the historical and evolutionary bias of the
time. And we must certainly note the revolution in morals
which took place at the instance (we might almost say) of the
Bildungsroman, for in the novels fathered by Wilhelm Meister
we get the almost complete identification of author and hero
and of the reader with both, and this identification almost inevitably suggests a leniency of moral judgment. The autobiographical novel has a further influence upon the moral sensibility by its exploitation of all the modulations of motive and
by its hinting that we may not judge a man by any single moment in his life without taking into account the determining
past and the expiating and fulfilling future.
It is difficult to know how to go on, for the further we look
the more literary affinities to Freud we find, and even if we
limit ourselves to bibliography we can at best be incomplete.
Yet we must mention the sexual revolution that was being
demanded by Shelley, for example, by the Schlegel of Lucinde, by George Sand, and later and more critically by Ibsen;
the belief in the sexual origin of art, baldly stated by Tieck,
more subtly by Schopenhauer; the investigation of sexual maladjustment by Stendhal, whose observations on erotic feeling seem to us distinctly Freudian. Again and again we
see the effective, utilitarian ego being relegated to an inferior position and a plea being made on behalf of the anarchic
and self-indulgent id. We find the energetic exploitation of
38 The Liberal Imagination
the idea of the mind as a divisible thing, one part of which can
contemplate and mock the other. It is not a far remove from
this to Dostoevski's brilliant instances of ambivalent feeling.
Novalis brings in the preoccupation with the death wish, and
this is linked on the one hand with sleep and on the other hand
with the perception of the perverse, self-destroying impulses,
which in turn leads us to that fascination by the horrible which
we find in Shelley, Poe, and Baudelaire. And always there is
the profound interest in the dream "Our dreams," said
Gerard de Nerval, "are a second life" and in the nature of
metaphor, which reaches its climax in Rimbaud and the later
Symbolists, metaphor becoming less and less communicative
as it approaches the relative autonomy of the dream life.
But perhaps we must stop to ask, since these are the components of the Zeitgeist from which Freud himself developed,
whether it can be said that Freud did indeed produce a wide
literary effect. What is it that Freud added that the tendency
of literature itself would not have developed without him? If
we were looking for a writer who showed the Freudian influence, Proust would perhaps come to mind as readily as anyone
else; the very title of his novel, in French more than in English, suggests an enterprise of psychoanalysis and scarcely less
so does his method the investigation of sleep, of sexual deviation, of the way of association, the almost obsessive interest
in metaphor; at these and at many other points the "influence"
might be shown. Yet I believe it is true that Proust did not
read Freud. Or again, exegesis of The Waste Land often reads
remarkably like the psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream,
yet we know that Eliot's methods were prepared for him not by
Freud but by other poets.
Nevertheless, it is of course true that Freud's influence on
literature has been very great. Much of it is so pervasive that
its extent is scarcely to be determined; in one form or another,
frequently in perversions or absurd simplifications, it has been
infused into our life and become a component of our culture
Freud and Literature gg
o which it is now hard to be specifically aware. In biography
its first effect was sensational but not fortunate. The early
Freudian biographers were for the most part Guildensterns
who seemed to know the pipes but could not pluck out the
heart of the mystery, and the same condemnation applies to
the early Freudian critics. But in recent years, with the ac-
climatization of psychoanalysis and the increased sense of its
refinements and complexity, criticism has derived from the
Freudian system much that is of great value, most notably the
license and the injunction to read the work of literature with
a lively sense of its latent and ambiguous meanings, as if it
were, as indeed it is, a being no less alive and contradictory
than the man who created it. And this new response to the
literary work has had a corrective effect upon our conception of
literary biography. The literary critic or biographer who
makes use of the Freudian theory is no less threatened by the
dangers of theoretical systematization than he was in the early
days, but he is likely to be more aware of these dangers; and I
think it is true to say that now the motive of his interpretation
is not that of exposing the secret shame of the writer and limiting the meaning of his work, but, on the contrary, that of finding grounds for sympathy with the writer and for increasing
the possible significances of the work.
The names of the creative writers who have been more or
less Freudian in tone or assumption would of course be legion.
Only a relatively small number, however, have made serious
use of the Freudian ideas. Freud himself seems to have thought
this was as it should be: he is said to have expected very little
of the works that were sent to him by writers with inscriptions
of gratitude for all they had learned from him. The Surrealists
have, with a certain inconsistency, depended upon Freud for
the "scientific" sanction of their program. Kafka, with an
apparent awareness of what he Was doing, has explored the
Freudian conceptions of guilt and punishment, of the dream,
and of the fear of the father. Thomas Mann, whose tendency,
40 The Liberal Imagination
as he himself says, was always in the direction of Freud's interests, has been most susceptible to the Freudian anthropology, finding a special charm in the theories of myths and
magical practices. James Joyce, with his interest in the numerous states of receding consciousness, with his use of words
as things and of words which point to more than one thing,
with his pervading sense of the interrelation and interpenetration of all things, and, not least important, his treatment of
familial themes, has perhaps most thoroughly and consciously
exploited Freud's ideas.
ii
It will be clear enough how much of Freud's thought
has significant affinity with the anti-rationalist element of the
Romanticist tradition. But we must see with no less distinctness how much of his system is militantly rationalistic. Thomas
Mann is at fault when, in his first essay on Freud, he makes it
seem that the "Apollonian," the rationalistic, side of psychoanalysis is, while certainly important and wholly admirable,
somehow secondary and even accidental. He gives us a Freud
who is committed to the "night side" of life. Not at all: the
rationalistic element of Freud is foremost; before everything
else he is positivistic. If the interpreter of dreams came to
medical science through Goethe, as he tells us he did, he
entered not by way of the Walpurgisnacht but by the essay
which played so important a part in the lives of so many scientists of the nineteenth century, the famous disquisition on
Nature.
This correction is needed not only for accuracy but also for
any understanding of Freud's attitude to art. And for that
understanding we must see how intense is the passion with
which Freud believes that positivistic rationalism, in its
golden-age pre-Revolutionary purity, is the very form and pattern of intellectual virtue. The aim of psychoanalysis, he says,
Freud and Literature 41
is the control of the night side of life. It is "to strengthen the
ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen
its field of vision, and so to extend the organization of the id."
"Where id was," that is, where all the irrational, non-logical,
pleasure-seeking dark forces were "there shall ego be," that
is, intelligence and control. "It is," he concludes, with a reminiscence of Faust, "reclamation work, like the draining of the
Zuyder Zee." This passage is quoted by Mann when, in taking
up the subject of Freud a second time, he does indeed speak
of Freud's positivistic program; but even here the bias induced
by Mann's artistic interest in the "night side" prevents him
from giving the other aspect of Freud its due emphasis. Freud
would never have accepted the role which Mann seems to give
him as the legitimizer of the myth and the dark irrational
ways of the mind. If Freud discovered the darkness for science
he never endorsed it. On the contrary, his rationalism supports
all the ideas of the Enlightenment that deny validity to myth
or religion; he holds to a simple materialism, to a simple determinism, to a rather limited sort of epistemology. No great
scientist of our day has thundered so articulately and so fiercely
against all those who would sophisticate with metaphysics the
scientific principles that were good enough for the nineteenth
century. Conceptualism or pragmatism is anathema to him
through the greater part of his intellectual career, and this,
when we consider the nature of his own brilliant scientific
methods, has surely an element of paradox in it.
From his rationalistic positivism comes much of Freud's
strength and what weakness he has. The strength is the fine,
clear tenacity of his positive aims, the goal of therapy, the desire to bring to men a decent measure of earthly happiness.
But upon the rationalism must also be placed the blame for
the often naive scientific principles which characterize his
early thought they are later much modified and which
consist largely of claiming for his theories a perfect corre-
4S The Liberal Imagination
spondence with an external reality, a position which, for those
who admire Freud and especially for those who take seriously
his views on art, is troublesome in the extreme.
Now Freud has, I believe, much to tell us about art, but
whatever is suggestive in him is not likely to be found in those
of his works in which he deals expressly with art itself. Freud
is not insensitive to art on the contrary nor does he ever
intend to speak of it with contempt. Indeed, he speaks of it
with a real tenderness and counts it one of the true charms
of the good life. Of artists, especially of writers, he speaks
with admiration and even a kind of awe, though perhaps
what he most appreciates" in literature are specific emotional
insights and observations; as we have noted, he speaks of
literary men, because they have understood the part played in
life by the hidden motives, as the precursors and coadjutors of
his own science.
And yet eventually Freud speaks of art with what we must
indeed call contempt. Art, he tells us, is a "substitute gratification," and as such is "an illusion in contrast to reality/'
Unlike most illusions, however, art is "almost always harmless and beneficent" for the reason that "it does not seek to
be anything but an illusion. Save in the case of a few peo-
ple who are, one might say, obsessed by Art, it never dares
make any attack on the realm of reality." One of its chief
functions is to serve as a "narcotic." It shares the characteristics of the dream, whose element of distortion Freud calls
a "sort of inner dishonesty." As for the artist, he is virtually
in the same category with the neurotic. "By such separation
of imagination and intellectual capacity," Freud says of the
hero of a novel, ''he is destined to be a poet or a neurotic, and
he belongs to that race of beings whose realm is not of this
world."
Now there is nothing in the logic of psychoanalytical
thought which requires Freud to have these opinions. But
there is a great deal in the practice of the psychoanalytical
Freud and Literature 43
therapy which makes it understandable that Freud, unpro-
tected by an adequate philosophy, should be tempted to take
the line he does. The analytical therapy deals with illusion.
The patient comes to the physician to be cured, let us say, of
a fear of walking in the street. The fear is real enough, there
is no illusion on that score, and it produces all the physical
symptoms of a more rational fear, the sweating palms, pounding heart, and shortened breath. But the patient knows that
there is no cause for the fear, or rather that there is, as he
says, no ''real cause": there are no machine guns, man traps,
or tigers in the street. The physician knows, however, that
there is indeed a "real" cause for the fear, though it has nothing at all to do with what is or is not in the street; the cause
is within the patient, and the process of the therapy will be
to discover, by gradual steps, what this real cause is and so
free the patient from its effects.
Now the patient in coming to the physician, and the physician in accepting the patient, make a tacit compact about
reality; for their purpose they agree to the limited reality
by which we get our living, win our loves, catch our trains
and our colds. The therapy will undertake to train the patient in proper ways of coping with this reality. The patient,
of course, has been dealing with this reality all along, but
in the wrong way. For Freud there are two ways of dealing with external reality. One is practical, effective, positive;
this is the way of the conscious self, of the ego which must be
made independent of the super-ego and extend its organization over the id, and it is the right way. The antithetical way
may be called, for our purpose now, the "fictional" way. Instead of doing something about, or to, external reality, the
individual who uses this way does something to, or about,
his affective states. The most common and "normal" example
of this is daydreaming, in which we give ourselves a certain
pleasure by imagining our difficulties solved or our desires
gratified. Then, too, as Freud discovered, sleeping dreams
44 The Liberal Imagination
are, in much more complicated ways, and even though quite
unpleasant, at the service of this same "fictional" activity. And
in ways yet more complicated and yet more unpleasant, the
actual neurosis from which our patient suffers deals with an
external reality which the mind considers still more unpleasant than the painful neurosis itself.
For Freud as psychoanalytic practitioner there are, we may
say, the polar extremes of reality and illusion. Reality is an
honorific word, and it means what is there; illusion is a pejorative word, and it means a response to what is not there.
The didactic nature of a course of psychoanalysis no doubt
requires a certain firm crudeness in making the distinction; it
is after all aimed not at theoretical refinement but at practical
effectiveness. The polar extremes are practical reality and
neurotic illusion, the latter judged by the former. This, no
doubt, is as it should be; the patient is not being trained in
metaphysics and epistemology.
This practical assumption is not Freud's only view of the
mind in its relation to reality. Indeed what may be called
the essentially Freudian view assumes that the mind, for good
as well as bad, helps create its reality by selection and evaluation. In this view, reality is malleable and subject to creation;
it is not static but is rather a series of situations which are
dealt with in their own terms. But beside this conception of
the mind stands the conception which arises from Freud's
therapeutic-practical assumptions; in this view, the mind
deals with a reality which is quite fixed and static, a reality that is wholly * 'given" and not (to use a phrase of Dewey's)
"taken." In his epistemological utterances, Freud insists on
this second view, although it is not easy to see why he should
do so. For the reality to which he wishes to reconcile the neurotic patient is, after all, a "taken" and not a "given" reality.
It is the reality of social life and of value, conceived and
maintained by the human mind and will. Love, morality,
honor, esteem these are the components of a created real-
Freud and Literature 45
ity. If we are to call art an illusion then we must call most
of the activities and satisfactions of the ego illusions; Freud,
of course, has no desire to call them that.
What, then, is the difference between, on the one hand,
the dream and the neurosis, and, on the other hand, art? That
they have certain common elements is of course clear; that
unconscious processes are at work in both would be denied
by no poet or critic; they share too, though in different degrees, the element of fantasy. But there is a vital difference
between them which Charles Lamb saw so clearly in his defense of the sanity of true genius: "The . . . poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but he has dominion over it."
That is the whole difference: the poet is in command of
his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he
is possessed by his fantasy. And there is a further difference
which Lamb states; speaking of the poet's relation to reality
(he calls it Nature), he says, "He is beautifully loyal to that
sovereign directress, even when he appears most to betray
her"; the illusions of art are made to serve the purpose of
a closer and truer relation with reality. Jacques Barzun, in
an acute and sympathetic discussion of Freud, puts the matter well: "A good analogy between art and dreaming has led
him to a false one between art and sleeping. But the difference between a work of art and a dream is precisely this, that
the work of art leads us back to the outer reality by taking
account of it." Freud's assumption of the almost exclusively
hedonistic nature and purpose of art bar him from the perception of this.
Of the distinction that must be made between the artist
and the neurotic Freud is of course aware; he tells us that the
artist is not like the neurotic in that he knows how to find a
way back from the world of imagination and "once more get
a firm foothold in reality/' This however seems to mean no
more than that reality is to be dealt with when the artist sus-
4.6 The Liberal Imagination
pends the practice of his art; and at least once when Freud
speaks of art dealing with reality he actually means the rewards that a successful artist can win. He does not deny to art
its function and its usefulness; it has a therapeutic effect in
releasing mental tension; it serves the cultural purpose of
acting as a "substitute gratification" to reconcile men to the
sacrifices they have made for culture's sake; it promotes the
social sharing of highly valued emotional experiences; and
it recalls men to their cultural ideals. This is not everything
that some of us would find that art does, yet even this is a
good deal for a "narcotic" to do.
in
I started by saying that Freud's ideas could tell us something about art, but so far I have done little more than try
to show that Freud's very conception of art is inadequate.
Perhaps, then, the suggestiveness lies in the application of
the analytic method to specific works of art or to the artist
himself? I do not think so, and it is only fair to say that Freud
himself was aware both of the limits and the limitations of
psychoanalysis in art, even though he does not always in practice submit to the former or admit the latter.
Freud has, for example, no desire to encroach upon the
artist's autonomy; he does not wish us to read his monograph
on Leonardo and then say of the "Madonna of the Rocks"
that it is a fine example of homosexual, autoerotic painting.
If he asserts that in investigation the "psychiatrist cannot
yield to the author," he immediately insists that the "author
cannot yield to the psychiatrist," and he warns the latter not
to "coarsen everything" by using for all human manifestations the "substantially useless and awkward terms" of clinical
procedure. He admits, even while asserting that the sense of
beauty probably derives from sexual feeling, that psychoanalysis "has less to say about beauty than about most other
Freud and Literature 47
things." He confesses to a theoretical indifference to the form
of art and restricts himself to its content. Tone, feeling, style,
and the modification that part makes upon part he does not
consider. "The layman," he says, "may expect perhaps too
much from analysis . . . for it must be admitted that it
throws no light upon the two problems which probably interest him the most. It can do nothing toward elucidating the
nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the means by
which the artist works artistic technique."
What, then, does Freud believe that the analytical method
can do? Two things: explain the "inner meanings" of the work
of art and explain the temperament of the artist as man.
A famous example of the method is the attempt to solve
the "problem" of Hamlet as suggested by Freud and as carried out by Dr. Ernest Jones, his early and distinguished follower. Dr. Jones's monograph is a work of painstaking scholarship and of really masterly ingenuity. The research undertakes not only the clearing up of the mystery of Hamlet's
character, but also the discovery of "the clue to much of the
deeper workings of Shakespeare's mind." Part of the mystery
in question is of course why Hamlet, after he had so definitely
resolved to do so, did not avenge upon his hated uncle his
father's death. But there is another mystery to the play
what Freud calls "the mystery of its effect," its magical appeal that draws so much interest toward it. Recalling the
many failures to solve the riddle of the play's charm, he wonders if we are to be driven to the conclusion "that its magical
appeal rests solely upon the impressive thoughts in it and
the splendor of its language." Freud believes that we can
find a source of power beyond this.
We remember that Freud has told us that the meaning of
a dream is its intention, and we may assume that the meaning of a drama is its intention, too. The Jones research undertakes to discover what it was that Shakespeare intended
to say about Hamlet. It finds that the intention was wrapped
48 The Liberal Imagination
by the author in a dreamlike obscurity because it touched so
deeply both his personal life and the moral life of the world;
what Shakespeare intended to say is that Hamlet cannot act
because he is incapacitated by the guilt he feels at his unconscious attachment to his mother. There is, I think, nothing to
be quarreled with in the statement that there is an Oedipus
situation in Hamlet; and if psychoanalysis has indeed added
a new point of interest to the play, that is to its credit. 1 And,
just so, there is no reason to quarrel with Freud's conclusion
when he undertakes to give us the meaning of King Lear by
a tortuous tracing of the mythological implications of the
theme of the three caskets, of the relation of the caskets to the
Norns, the Fates, and the Graces, of the connection of these
triadic females with Lear's daughters, of the transmogrification of the death goddess into the love goddess and the identification of Cordelia with both, all to the conclusion that
the meaning of King Lear is to be found in the tragic refusal
of an old man to ' 'renounce love, choose death, and make
friends with the necessity of dying." There is something both
beautiful and suggestive in this, but it is not the meaning of
King Lear any more than the Oedipus motive is the meaning
of Hamlet.
It is not here a question of the validity of the evidence,
though that is of course important. We must rather object to
the conclusions of Freud and Dr. Jones on the ground that
their proponents do not have an adequate conception of what
an artistic meaning is. There is no single meaning to any
work of art; this is true not merely because it is better that it
should be true, that is, because it makes art a richer thing,
i However, A. C. Bradley, in his discussion of Hamlet (Shakespearean
Tragedy), states clearly the intense sexual disgust which Hamlet feels
and
which, for Bradley, helps account for his uncertain purpose; and
Bradley was
anticipated in this view by Lonmg. It is well known, and Dover Wilson
has
lately emphasized the point, that to an Elizabethan audience Hamlet's
mother
was not merely tasteless, as to a modern audience she seems, in
hurrying to
marry Claudius, but actually adulterous in marrying him at all because
he
was, as her brother-in-law, within the forbidden degrees.
Freud and Literature 4g
but because historical and personal experience show it to be
true. Changes in historical context and in personal mood
change the meaning of a work and indicate to us that artistic
understanding is not a question of fact but of value. Even
if the author's intention were, as it cannot be, precisely determinable, the meaning of a work cannot lie in the author's
intention alone. It must also lie in its effect. We can say of a
volcanic eruption on an inhabited island that it "means terrible suffering," but if the island is uninhabited or easily
evacuated it means something else. In short, the audience
partly determines the meaning of the work. But although
Freud sees something of this when he says that in addition
to the author's intention we must take into account the mystery of Hamlet's effect, he nevertheless goes on to speak as if,
historically, Hamlet's effect had been single and brought
about solely by the "magical" power of the Oedipus motive
to which, unconsciously, we so violently respond. Yet there
was, we know, a period when Hamlet was relatively in eclipse,
and it has always been scandalously true of the French, a people not without filial feeling, that they have been somewhat
indifferent to the ' 'magical appeal'* of Hamlet.
I do not think that anything I have said about the inadequacies of the Freudian method of interpretation limits the
number of ways we can deal with a work of art. Bacon remarked that experiment may twist nature on the rack to
wring out its secrets, and criticism may use any instruments
upon a work of art to find its meanings. The elements of art
are not limited to the world of art. They reach into life, and
whatever extraneous knowledge of them we gain for example, by research into the historical context of the work
may quicken our feelings for the work itself and even enter
legitimately into those feelings. Then, too, anything we may
learn about the artist himself may be enriching and legitimate. But one research into the mind of the artist is simply
not practicable, however legitimate it may theoretically be.
50 The Liberal Imagination
That is, the investigation of his unconscious intention as it
exists apart from the work Itself. Criticism understands that
the artist's statement of his conscious Intention, though it is
sometimes useful, cannot finally determine meaning. How
much less can we know from his unconscious intention considered as something apart from the whole work? Surely very
little that can be called conclusive or scientific. For, as Freud
himself points out, we are not in a position to question the
artist; we must apply the technique of dream analysis to his
symbols, but, as Freud says with some heat, those people do
not understand his theory who think that a dream may be
Interpreted without the dreamer's free association with the
multitudinous details of his dream.
We have so far ignored the aspect of the method which finds
the solution to the "mystery" of such a play as Hamlet in the
temperament of Shakespeare himself and then illuminates
the mystery of Shakespeare's temperament by means of the
solved mystery of the play. Here it will be amusing to remember that by 1935 Freud had become converted to the
theory that It was not Shakespeare of Stratford but the Earl
of Oxford who wrote the plays, thus invalidating the important bit of evidence that Shakespeare's father died shortly
before the composition of Hamlet. This is destructive enough
to Dr. Jones's argument, but the evidence from which Dr.
Jones draws conclusions about literature fails on grounds
more relevant to literature itself. For when Dr. Jones, by
means of his analysis of Hamlet, takes us into "the deeper
workings of Shakespeare's mind," he does so with a perfect
confidence that he knows what Hamlet is and what its relation to Shakespeare is. It is, he tells us, Shakespeare's "chief
masterpiece," so far superior to all his other works that it
may be placed on "an entirely separate level." And then,
having established his ground on an entirely subjective
literary judgment, Dr. Jones goes on to tell us that Hamlet
"probably expresses the core of Shakespeare's philosophy and
Freud and Literature 51
outlook as no other work of his does." That is, all the contradictory or complicating or modifying testimony of the
other plays is dismissed on the basis of Dr. Jones's acceptance
of the peculiar position which, he believes, Hamlet occupies
in the Shakespeare canon. And it is upon this quite inadmissible judgment that Dr. Jones bases his argument: "It may
be expected therefore that anything which will give us the
key to the inner meaning of the play will necessarily give us
the clue to much of the deeper workings o Shakespeare's
mind." (The italics are mine.)
I should be sorry if it appeared that I am trying to say that
psychoanalysis can have nothing to do with literature. I am
sure that the opposite is so. For example, the whole notion of
rich ambiguity in literature, of the interplay between the apparent meaning and the latent not "hidden" meaning, has
been reinforced by the Freudian concepts, perhaps even received its first impetus from them. Of late years, the more
perceptive psychoanalysts have surrendered the early preten-
sions of their teachers to deal "scientifically" with literature.
That is all to the good, and when a study as modest and precise as Dr. Franz Alexander's essay on Henry IV comes along,
an essay which pretends not to "solve" but only to illuminate
the subject, we have something worth having. Dr. Alexander
undertakes nothing more than to say that in the development
of Prince Hal we see the classic struggle of the ego to come to
normal adjustment, beginning with the rebellion against the
father, going on to the conquest of the super-ego (Hotspur,
with his rigid notions of honor and glory), then to the conquests of the id (Falstaff, with his anarchic self-indulgence),
then to the identification with the father (the crown scene)
and the assumption of mature responsibility. An analysis of
this sort is not momentous and not exclusive of other meanings; perhaps it does no more than point up and formulate
what we all have already seen. It has the tact to accept the
play and does not, like Dr. Jones's study of Hamlet, search
52 The Liberal Imagination
for a "hidden motive" and a "deeper working," which implies
that there is a reality to which the play stands in the relation that a dream stands to the wish that generates it and
from which it is separable; it is this reality, this "deeper working/' which, according to Dr. Jones, produced the play. But
Hamlet is not merely the product of Shakespeare's thought, it
is the very instrument of his thought, and if meaning is intention, Shakespeare did not intend the Oedipus motive or
anything less than Hamlet; if meaning is effect then it is Hamlet which affects us, not the Oedipus motive. Coriolanus also
deals, and very terribly, with the Oedipus motive, but the
effect of the one drama is very different from the effect of the
other.
IV
If, then, we can accept neither Freud's conception of the
place of art in life nor his application of the analytical method,
what is it that he contributes to our understanding of art or
to its practice? In my opinion, what he contributes outweighs
his errors; it is of the greatest importance, and it lies in no
specific statement that he makes about art but is, rather, implicit in his whole conception of the mind.
For, of all mental systems, the Freudian psychology is the
one which makes poetry indigenous to the very constitution
of the mind. Indeed, the mind, as Freud sees it, is in the
greater part of its tendency exactly a poetry-making organ.
This puts the case too strongly, no doubt, for it seems to make
the working of the unconscious mind equivalent to poetry
itself, forgetting that between the unconscious mind and the
finished poem there supervene the social intention and the
formal control of the conscious mind. Yet the statement has
at least the virtue of counterbalancing the belief, so commonly expressed or implied, that the very opposite is true, and
Freud and Literature 53
that poetry is a kind of beneficent aberration o the mind's
right course.
Freud has not merely naturalized poetry; he has discovered
its status as a pioneer settler, and he sees it as a method of
thought. Often enough he tries to show how, as a method of
thought, it is unreliable and ineffective for conquering reality; yet he himself is forced to use it in the very shaping of his
own science, as when he speaks of the topography of the mind
and tells us with a kind of defiant apology that the metaphors
of space relationship which he is using are really most inexact
since the mind is not a thing of space at all, but that there is
no other way of conceiving the difficult idea except by metaphor. In the eighteenth century Vico spoke of the metaphorical, imagistic language of the early stages of culture; it
was left to Freud to discover how, in a scientific age, we still
feel and think in figurative formations, and to create, what
psychoanalysis is, a science of tropes, of metaphor and its variants, synecdoche and metonomy.
Freud showed, too, how the mind, in one of its parts, could
work without logic, yet not without that directing purpose,
that control of intent from which, perhaps it might be said,
logic springs. For the unconscious mind works without the
syntactical conjunctions which are logic's essence. It recognizes no because, no therefore^ no but; such ideas as similarity, agreement, and community are expressed in dreams
imagistically by compressing the elements into a unity.
The unconscious mind in its struggle with the conscious always turns from the general to the concrete and finds the
tangible trifle more congenial than the large abstraction.
Freud discovered in the very organization of the mind those
mechanisms by which art makes its effects, such devices as
the condensations of meanings and the displacement of accent.
All this is perhaps obvious enough and, though I should
54 The Liberal Imagination
like to develop it in proportion both to its importance and to
the space I have given to disagreement with Freud, I will not
press it further. For there are two other elements in Freud's
thought which, in conclusion, I should like to introduce as
of great weight in their bearing on art.
Of these, one is a specific idea which, in the middle of his
career (1920), Freud put forward in his essay Beyond the
Pleasure Principle. The essay itself is a speculative attempt
to solve a perplexing problem in clinical analysis, but its
relevance to literature is inescapable, as Freud sees well
enough, even though his perception of its critical importance
is not sufficiently strong to make him revise his earlier views
of the nature and function of art. The idea is one which
stands besides Aristotle's notion of the catharsis, in part to
supplement, in part to modify it.
Freud has come upon certain facts which are not to be reconciled with his earlier theory of the dream. According to
this theory, all dreams, even the unpleasant ones, could be
understood upon analysis to have the intention of fulfilling
the dreamer's wishes. They are in the service of what Freud
calls the pleasure principle, which is opposed to the reality
principle. It is, of course, this explanation of the dream which
had so largely conditioned Freud's theory of art. But now there
is thrust upon him the necessity for reconsidering the theory
of the dream, for it was found that in cases of war neurosis
what we once called shellshock the patient, with the utmost
anguish, recurred in his dreams to the very situation, distressing as it was, which had precipitated his neurosis. It seemed
impossible to interpret these dreams by any assumption of a
hedonistic intent. Nor did there seem to be the usual amount
of distortion in them: the patient recurred to the terrible
initiatory situation with great literalness. And the same pat-
tern of psychic behavior could be observed in the play of
children; there were some games which, far from fulfilling
wishes, seemed to concentrate upon the representation of
Freud and Literature 55
those aspects of the child's life which were most unpleasant
and threatening to his happiness.
To explain such mental activities Freud evolved a theory
for which he at first refused to claim much but to which, with
the years, he attached an increasing importance. He first
makes the assumption that there is indeed in the psychic
life a repetition-compulsion which goes beyond the pleasure
principle. Such a compulsion cannot be meaningless, it must
have an intent. And that intent, Freud comes to believe, is
exactly and literally the developing of fear. "These dreams/'
he says, "are attempts at restoring control of the stimuli by
developing apprehension, the pretermission of which caused
the traumatic neurosis." The dream, that is, is the effort to reconstruct the bad situation in order that the failure to meet
it may be recouped; in these dreams there is no obscured intent to evade but only an attempt to meet the situation, to
make a new effort of control. And in the play of children it
seems to be that "the child repeats even the unpleasant experiences because through his own activity he gains a far
more thorough mastery of the strong impression than was
possible by mere passive experience/'
Freud, at this point, can scarcely help being put in mind of
tragic drama; nevertheless, he does not wish to believe that
this effort to come to mental grips with a situation is involved
in the attraction of tragedy. He is, we might say, under the
influence of the Aristotelian tragic theory which emphasizes
a qualified hedonism through suffering. But the pleasure involved in tragedy is perhaps an ambiguous one; and sometimes we must feel that the famous sense of cathartic resolution is perhaps the result of glossing over terror with beautiful
language rather than an evacuation of it. And sometimes the
terror even bursts through the language to stand stark and
isolated from the play, as does Oedipus's sightless and bleeding face. At any rate, the Aristotelian theory does not deny
another function for tragedy (and for comedy, too) which is
56 The Liberal Imagination
suggested by Freud's theory of the traumatic neurosis what
might be called the mithridatic function, by which tragedy
is used as the homeopathic administration of pain to inure
ourselves to the greater pain which life will force upon us.
There is in the cathartic theory of tragedy, as it is usually understood, a conception of tragedy's function which is too
negative and which inadequately suggests the sense of active
mastery which tragedy can give.
In the same essay in which he sets forth the conception of the
mind embracing its own pain for some vital purpose, Freud
also expresses a provisional assent to the idea (earlier stated,
as he reminds us, by Schopenhauer) that there is perhaps a
human drive which makes of death the final and desired goal.
The death instinct is a conception that is rejected by many
of even the most thoroughgoing Freudian theorists (as, in his
last book, Freud mildly noted); the late Otto Fenichel in his
authoritative work on the neurosis argues cogently against it.
Yet even if we reject the theory as not fitting the facts in any
operatively useful way, we still cannot miss its grandeur, its
ultimate tragic courage in acquiescence to fate. The idea of
the reality principle and the idea of the death instinct form
the crown of Freud's broader speculation on the life of man.
Their quality of grim poetry is characteristic of Freud's system
and the ideas it generates for him.
And as much as anything else that Freud gives to literature,
this quality of his thought is important. Although the artist
is never finally determined in his work by the intellectual
systems about him, he cannot avoid their influence; and it
can be said of various competing systems that some hold more
promise for the artist than others. When, for example, we
think of the simple humanitarian optimism which, for two
decades, has been so pervasive, we must see that not only has
it been politically and philosophically inadequate, but also
that it implies, by the smallness of its view of the varieties
of human possibility, a kind of check on the creative facul-
Freud and Literature 57
ties. In Freud's view of life no such limitation is Implied.
To be sure, certain elements of his system seem hostile to the
usual notions of man's dignity. Like every great critic of human nature and Freud is that he finds in human pride the
ultimate cause of human wretchedness, and he takes pleasure in knowing that his ideas stand with those of Copernicus
and Darwin in making pride more difficult to maintain. Yet
the Freudian man is, I venture to think, a creature of far
more dignity and far more interest than the man which any
other modern system has been able to conceive. Despite
popular belief to the contrary, man, as Freud conceives him,
is not to be understood by any simple formula (such as sex)
but is rather an inextricable tangle of culture and biology.
And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has, as Freud
says somewhere, a kind of hell within him from which rise
everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He
has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of
pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his
best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are
the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a
creature of love; it is Freud's sharpest criticism of the Adlerian psychology that to aggression it gives everything and
to love nothing at all.
One is always aware in reading Freud how little cynicism
there is in his thought. His desire for man is only that he
should be human, and to this end his science is devoted. No
view of life to which the artist responds can insure the quality
of his work, but the poetic qualities of Freud's own principles,
which are so clearly in the line of the classic tragic realism, suggest that this is a view which does not narrow and simplify the
human world for the artist but on the contrary opens and
complicates it.
The Princess Casamassima
In 1888, on the second of January, which in any year is likely
to be a sad day, Henry James wrote to his friend William Dean
Howells that his reputation had been dreadfully injured by
his last two novels. The desire for his productions, he said,
had been reduced to zero, editors no longer asked for his
work, they even seemed ashamed to publish the stories they
had already bought. But James was never without courage.
"However, I don't despair/' he wrote, "for I think I am now
really in better form than I ever have been in my life and I
propose yet to do many things/' And then, no doubt with the
irony all writers use when they dare to speak of future recognition, but also, surely, with the necessary faith, he concludes the matter: "Very likely too, some day, all my buried
prose will kick off its various tombstones at once/'
And so it happened. The "some day" has arrived and we
have been hearing the clatter of marble as James's buried
prose kicks off its monuments in a general resurrection. On
all sides James is being given the serious and joyous interest
he longed for in his lifetime.
One element of our interest must be the question of how
some of James's prose ever came to be buried at all. It is not
hard to understand why certain of James's books did not catch
the contemporary fancy. But the two books on which James
placed the blame for his diminishing popularity were The
Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, and of all James's
58
The Princess Casamassima 59
novels these are the two which are most likely to make an
immediate appeal to the reader of today. That they should
not have delighted their contemporary public, but on the
contrary should have turned it against James, makes a lively
problem in the history of taste. 1
In the masterpieces of his late years James became a difficult
writer. This is the fact and nothing is gained for James by
denying it. He himself knew that these late works were difficult; he wished them to be dealt with as if they were difficult.
When a young man from Texas it was Mr. Stark Young
inquired indirectly of James how he should go about reading
his novels, James did not feel that this diffidence was provincial but happily drew up lists which would lead the admirable
young man from the easy to the hard. But the hostility with
which The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima were
received cannot be explained by any difficulty either of manner or intention, for in these books there is none. The prose,
although personally characteristic, is perfectly in the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel. It is warm, fluent, and
on the whole rather less elaborate and virtuose than Dickens'
prose. The motives of the characters are clear and direct
certainly they are far from the elaborate punctilio of the late
masterpieces. And the charge that is sometimes made against
the later work, that it exists in a social vacuum, clearly does
not pertain here. In these novels James is at the point in his
career at which society, in the largest and even the grossest
sense, is offering itself to his mind with great force. He un-
i Whoever wishes to know what the courage of the artist must
sometimes
be could do no better than to read the British reviews of The
Bostonians and
The Princess Casamassima. In a single year James brought out two
major
works; he thought they were his best to date and expected great things
of
them; he was told by the reviewers that they were not really novels at
all; he
was scorned and sneered at and condescended to and dismissed. In
adjacent
columns the ephemeral novels of the day were treated with gentle
respect.
The American press rivaled the British in the vehemence with which it
condemned The Bostonians, but it was more tolerant of The Princess
Casamassima.
Go The Liberal Imagination
derstands society as crowds and police, as a field of justice and
injustice, reform and revolution. The social texture of his
work is grainy and knotted with practicality and detail. And
more: his social observation is of a kind that we must find
startlingly prescient when we consider that it was made some
sixty years ago.
It is just this prescience, of course, that explains the resistance of James's contemporaries. What James saw he saw truly,
but it was not what the readers of his time were themselves
equipped to see. That we now are able to share his vision required the passage of six decades and the events which brought
them to climax. Henry James in the eighties understood what
we have painfully learned from our grim glossary of wars and
concentration camps, after having seen the state and human
nature laid open to our horrified inspection. "But I have the
imagination of disaster and see life as ferocious and sinister":
James wrote this to A. C. Benson in 1896, and what so bland
a young man as Benson made of the statement, what anyone
then was likely to make of it, is hard to guess. But nowadays
we know that such an imagination is one of the keys to truth.
It was, then, "the imagination of disaster" that cut James
off from his contemporaries and it is what recommends him
to us now. We know something about the profound disturbance of the sexual life which seems to go along with hypertrophy of the will and how this excess of will seems to be a
response to certain maladjustments in society and to direct
itself back upon them; D. H. Lawrence taught us much about
this, but Lawrence himself never attempted a more daring
conjunction of the sexual and the political life than Henry
James succeeds with in The Bostonians. We know much
about misery and downtroddenness and of what happens
when strong and gifted personalities are put at a hopeless
disadvantage, and about the possibilities of extreme violence,
and about the sense of guilt and unreality which may come
to members of the upper classes and the strange complex ef-
The Princess Casamassima 61
forts they make to find innocence and reality, and about the
conflict between the claims of art and of social duty these
are among the themes which make the pattern of The Princess Casamassima. It is a novel which has at its very center the
assumption that Europe has reached the full of its ripeness
and is passing over into rottenness, that the peculiarly beautiful light it gives forth is in part the reflection of a glorious
past and in part the phosphorescence of a present decay, that
it may meet its end by violence and that this is not wholly
unjust, although never before has the old sinful continent
made so proud and pathetic an assault upon our affections.
11
The Princess Casamassima belongs to a great line of novels
which runs through the nineteenth century as, one might say,
the very backbone of its fiction. These novels, which are
defined as a group by the character and circumstance of their
heroes, include Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Balzac's
Pere Goriot and Lost Illusions, Dickens' Great Expectations,
Flaubert's Sentimental Education; only a very slight extension of the definition is needed to allow the inclusion of
Tolstoi's War and Peace and Dostoevski's The Idiot.
The defining hero may be known as the Young Man from
the Provinces. He need not come from the provinces in literal
fact, his social class may constitute his province. But a provincial birth and rearing suggest the simplicity and the high
hopes he begins with he starts with a great demand upon
life and a great wonder about its complexity and promise.
He may be of good family but he must be poor. He is intelligent, or at least aware, but not at all shrewd in worldly matters. He must have acquired a certain amount of education,
should have learned something about life from books, although not the truth.
The hero of The Princess Casamassima conforms very ex-
6s The Liberal Imagination
actly to type. The province from which Hyacinth Robinson
comes is a city slum. "He sprang up at me out of the London pavement," says James in the preface to the novel in the
New York Edition. In 1883, the first year of his long residence in England, James was in the habit of prowling the
streets, and they yielded him the image "of some individual
sensitive nature or fine mind, some small obscure creature
whose education should have been almost wholly derived
from them, capable of profiting by all the civilization, all the
accumulation to which they testify, yet condemned to see
things only from outside in mere quickened consideration,
mere wistfulness and envy and despair."
Thus equipped with poverty, pride, and intelligence, the
Young Man from the Provinces stands outside life and seeks
to enter. This modern hero is connected with the tales of the
folk. Usually his motive is the legendary one of setting out
to seek his fortune, which is what the folktale says when it
means that the hero is seeking himself. He is really the third
and youngest son of the woodcutter, the one to whom all our
sympathies go, the gentle and misunderstood one, the bravest
of all. He is likely to be in some doubt about his parentage;
his father the woodcutter is not really his father. Our hero has,
whether he says so or not, the common belief of children that
there is some mystery about his birth; his real parents, if the
truth were known, are of great and even royal estate. Julien
Sorel of The Red and the Black is the third and youngest son
of an actual woodcutter, but he is the spiritual son of Napoleon. In our day the hero of The Great Gatsby is not really the
son of Mr. Gatz; he is said to have sprung "from his Platonic
conception of himself," to be, indeed, "the son of God." And
James's Hyacinth Robinson, although fostered by a poor dressmaker and a shabby fiddler, has an English lord for his real
father.
It is the fate of the Young Man to move from an obscure
position into one of considerable eminence in Paris or Lon-
The Princess Casamassima 63
don or St. Petersburg, to touch the life of the rulers of the
earth. His situation is as chancy as that of any questing knight
of medieval romance. He is confronted by situations whose*
meanings are dark to him, in which his choice seems always
decisive. He understands everything to be a "test." Parsifal
at the castle of the Fisher King is not more uncertain about
the right thing to do than the Young Man from the Provinces picking his perilous way through the irrationalities of
the society into which he has been transported. That the
Young Man be introduced into great houses and involved
with large affairs is essential to his story, which must not be
confused with the cognate story of the Sensitive Young Man.
The provincial hero must indeed be sensitive, and in proportion to the brassiness of the world; he may even be an artist;
but it is not his part merely to be puzzled and hurt; he is not
the hero of The Way of All Flesh or Of Human Bondage or
Mooncalf. Unlike the merely sensitive hero, he is concerned
to know how the political and social world are run and enjoyed; he wants a share of power and pleasure and in consequence he takes real risks, often of his life. The "swarming
facts" that James tells us Hyacinth is to confront are "freedom and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity,
and satiety."
The story of the Young Man from the Provinces is thus a
strange one, for it has its roots both in legend and in the very
heart of the modern actuality. From it we have learned most
of what we know about modern society, about class and its
strange rituals, about power and influence and about money,
the hard fluent fact in which modern society has its being.
Yet through the massed social fact there runs the thread of
legendary romance, even of downright magic. We note, for
example, that it seems necessary for the novelist to deal in
transformation. Some great and powerful hand must reach
down into the world of seemingly chanceless routine and pick
up the hero and set him down in his complex and danger-
64 The Liberal Imagination
cms fate. Pip meets Magwitch on the marsh, a felon-godfather;
Pierre Bezuhov unexpectedly inherits the fortune that permits this uncouth young man to make his tour of Russian
society; powerful unseen forces play around the proud head
of Julien Sorel to make possible his astonishing upward career; Rastignac, simply by being one of the boarders at the
Maison Vauquer which also shelters the great Vautrin, moves
to the very center of Parisian intrigue; James Gatz rows out
to a millionaire's yacht, a boy in dungarees, and becomes Jay
Gatsby, an Oxford man, a military hero.
Such transformations represent, with only slight exaggeration, the literal fact that was to be observed every day. From
the late years of the eighteenth century through the early
years of the twentieth, the social structure of the West was
peculiarly fitted one might say designed for changes in fortune that were magical and romantic. The upper-class ethos
was strong enough to make it remarkable that a young man
should cross the borders, yet weak enough to permit the crossing in exceptional cases. A shiftless boy from Geneva, a starveling and a lackey, becomes the admiration of the French aristocracy and is permitted by Europe to manipulate its assumptions in every department of life: Jean Jacques Rousseau is the
father of all the Young Men from the Provinces, including
the one from Corsica.
The Young Man's story represents an actuality, yet we may
be sure that James took special delight in its ineluctable legendary element. James was certainly the least primitive of artists, yet he was always aware of his connection with the primitive. He set great store by the illusion of probability and
verisimilitude, but he knew that he dealt always with illusion;
he was proud of the devices of his magic. Like any primitive
storyteller, he wished to hold the reader against his will, to enchant, as we say. He loved what he called "the story as story";
he delighted to work, by means of this unusual, the extravagant, the melodramatic, and the supernatural, upon what he
The Princess Casamassima 65
called "the blessed faculty of wonder"; and he understood
primitive story to be the root of the modern novelist's art.
F. O. Matthiessen speaks of the fairytale quality of The Wings
of the Dove; so sophisticated a work as The Ambassadors can
be read as one of those tales in which the hero finds that
nothing is what it seems and that the only guide through the
world must be the goodness of his heart.
Like any great artist of story, like Shakespeare or Balzac or
Dickens or Dostoevski, James crowds probability rather closer
than we nowadays like. It is not that he gives us unlikely
events but that he sometimes thickens the number of interesting events beyond our ordinary expectation. If this, in
James or in any storyteller, leads to a straining of our sense
of verisimilitude, there is always the defense to be made that
the special job of literature is, as .Marianne Moore puts it,
the creation of "imaginary gardens with real toads in them.'*
The reader who detects that the garden is imaginary should
not be led by his discovery to a wrong view of the reality of
the toads. In settling questions of reality and truth in fiction,
it must be remembered that, although the novel in certain of
its forms resembles the accumulative and classificatory sciences, which are the sciences most people are most at home
with, in certain other of its forms the novel approximates the
sciences of experiment. And an experiment is very like an imaginary garden which is laid out for the express purpose of supporting a real toad of fact. The apparatus of the researcher's
bench is not nature itself but an artificial and extravagant contrivance, much like a novelist's plot, which is devised to force
or foster a fact into being. This seems to have been James's
own view of the part that is played in his novels by what he calls
"romance." He seems to have had an analogy with experiment
very clearly in mind when he tells us that romance is "experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that
usually attach to it." Again and again he speaks of the contriv-
66 The Liberal Imagination
ance of a novel in ways which will make it seem like illegitimate flummery to the reader who is committed only to the
premises of the naturalistic novel, but which the intelligent
scientist will understand perfectly.
Certainly The Princess Casamassima would seem to need
some such defense as this, for it takes us, we are likely to feel,
very far along the road to romance, some will think to the
very point of impossibility. It asks us to accept a poor young
man whose birth is darkly secret, his father being a dissipated
but authentic English lord, his mother a French courtesanseamstress who murders the father; a beautiful AmericanItalian princess who descends in the social scale to help "the
people''; a general mingling of the very poor with persons of
exalted birth; and then a dim mysterious leader of revolution, never seen by the reader, the machinations of an underground group of conspirators, an oath taken to carry out an
assassination at some unspecified future day, the day arriving,
the hour of the killing set, the instructions and the pistol
given.
Confronted by paraphernalia like this, even those who admire the book are likely to agree with Rebecca West when,
in her exuberant little study of James, she tells us that it is
"able" and "meticulous" but at the same time "distraught"
and "wild," that the "loveliness" in it comes from a transmutation of its "perversities"; she speaks of it as a "mad dream"
and teases its vast unlikelihood, finding it one of the big jokes
in literature that it was James, who so prided himself on his
lack of naivete, who should have brought back to fiction the
high implausibility of the old novels which relied for their
effects on dark and stormy nights, Hindu servants, mysterious
strangers, and bloody swords wiped on richly embroidered
handkerchiefs.
Miss West was writing in 1916, when the English naturalistic novel, with its low view of possibility, was in full pride.
Our notion of political possibility was still to be changed by
68 The Liberal Imagination
James really did no more than consult his penetrating imagination which no doubt was nourished like any other on
conversation and the daily newspaper then we must say that
in no other novelist did the root of the matter go so deep and
so wide. For the truth is that there is not a political event of
The Princess Casamassima, not a detail of oath or mystery or
danger, which is not confirmed by multitudinous records.
in
We are inclined to flatter our own troubles with the u .dt
that the late nineteenth century was a peaceful time. But
James knew its actual violence. England was, to be sure, rather
less violent than the Continent, but the history of England in
the eighties was one of profound social unrest often intensified to disorder. In March of 1886, the year in which The
Princess Casamassima appeared in book form, James wrote
to his brother William of a riot in his street, of ladies' carriages being stopped and the ''occupants hustled, rifled,
slapped, and kissed." He does not think that the rioters were
unemployed workingmen, more likely that they were "the
great army of roughs and thieves." But he says that there is
"immense destitution" and that "everyone is getting poorer
from causes which, I fear, will continue." In the same year
he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton that the state of the British
upper class seems to be "in many ways very much the same
rotten and collapsible one of the French aristocracy before
the revolution."
James envisaged revolution, and not merely as a convenience for his fiction. But he imagined a kind of revolution with
which we are no longer familiar. It was not a Marxian revolution. There is no upsurge of an angry proletariat led by a
disciplined party which plans to head a new strong state. Such
a revolution has its conservative aspect it seeks to save certain elements of bourgeois culture for its own use, for ex-
The Princess Casamassima 69
ample, science and the means of production and even some
social agencies. The revolutionary theory of The Princess
Casamassima has little in common with this. There is no organized mass movement; there is no disciplined party but
only a strong conspiratorial center. There are no plans for
taking over the state and almost no ideas about the society
of the future. The conspiratorial center plans only for destruction, chiefly personal terrorism. But James is not naively
representing a radical Graustark; he is giving a very accurate
account of anarchism.
In 1 872, at its meeting in The Hague, the First International
voted the expulsion of the anarchists. Karl Marx had at last
won his long battle with Bakunin. From that point on, "scientific socialism" was to dominate revolutionary thought.
Anarchism ceased to be a main current of political theory.
But anarchism continued as a force to be reckoned with,
especially in the Latin countries, and it produced a revolutionary type of great courage and sometimes of appealing
interest. Even in decline the theory and action of anarchism
dominated the imagination of Europe.
It is not possible here to give a discriminating account of
anarchism in all its aspects; to distinguish between the mutation which verges on nihilism and that which is called
communist-anarchism, or between its representatives, Sergei
Nechayev, who had the character of a police spy, and Kropotkin or the late Carlo Tresca, who were known for their
personal sweetness; or to resolve the contradiction between
the violence of its theory and action and the gentle world
toward which these are directed. It will have to be enough to
say that anarchism holds that the natural goodness of man is
absolute and that society corrupts it, and that the guide to
anarchist action is the desire to destroy society in general and
not merely a particular social form.
When, therefore, Hyacinth Robinson is torn between his
desire for social justice and his fear lest the civilization of
^o The Liberal Imagination
Europe be destroyed, he is dealing reasonably with anarchist
belief. ''The unchaining of what is today called the evil passions and the destruction of what is called public order" was
the consummation of Bakunin's aim which he defended by
saying that "the desire for destruction is at the same time a
creative desire." It was not only the state but all social forms
that were to be demolished according to the doctrine of
amorphism; any social form held the seeds of the state's rebirth and must therefore be extirpated. Intellectual disciplines were social forms like any other. At least in its early
days anarchism expressed hostility toward science. Toward
the arts the hostility was less, for the early leaders were often
trained in the humanities and their inspiration was largely
literary; in the nineties there was a strong alliance between
the French artists and the anarchist groups. But in the logic
of the situation art was bound to come under the anarchist
fire. Art is inevitably associated with civil peace and social
order and indeed with the ruling classes. Then too any large
intense movement of moral-political action is likely to be
jealous of art and to feel that it is in competition with the full
awareness of human suffering. Bakunin on several occasions
spoke of it as of no account when the cause of human happiness was considered. Lenin expressed something of the same
sort when, after having listened with delight to a sonata by
Beethoven, he said that he could not listen to music too often.
"It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice
things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such
beauty while living in this vile hell. And you mustn't stroke
anyone's head you might get your hand bitten off." And
similarly the Princess of James's novel feels that her taste is
but the evidence of her immoral aristocratic existence and
that art is a frivolous distraction from revolution.
The nature of the radicals in The Princess Casamassima
may, to the modern reader, seem a distortion of fact. The
people who meet at the Sun and Moon to mutter their wrongs
The Princess Casamassima 71
over their beer are not revolutionists and scarcely radicals;
most of them are nothing more than dull malcontents. Yet
they represent with complete accuracy the political development of a large part of the working class of England at the
beginning of the eighties. The first great movement of English trade unionism had created an aristocracy of labor largely
cut off from the mass of the workers, and the next great movement had not yet begun; the political expression of men
such as met at the Sun and Moon was likely to be as fumbling
as James represents it.
James has chosen the occupations of these men with great
discrimination. There are no factory workers among them;
at that time anarchism did not attract factory workers so much
as the members of the skilled and relatively sedentary trades:
tailors, shoemakers, weavers, cabinetmakers, and ornamentalmetal workers. Hyacinth's craft of bookbinding was no doubt
chosen because James knew something about it and because,
being at once a fine and a mechanic art, it perfectly suited
Hyacinth's fate, but it is to the point that bookbinders were
largely drawn to anarchism.
When Paul Muniment tells Hyacinth that the club of the
Sun and Moon is a "place you have always overestimated,"
he speaks with the authority of one who has connections more
momentous. The anarchists, although of course they wished
to influence the masses and could on occasion move them to
concerted action, did not greatly value democratic or quasidemocratic mass organizations. Bakunin believed that "for the
international organization of all Europe one hundred revolutionists, strongly and seriously bound together, are sufficient." The typical anarchist organization was hierarchical
and secret. When in 1867 Bakunin drew up plans of organization, he instituted three "orders": a public group to be
known as the International Alliance of Social Democracy;
then above this and not known to it the Order of National
Brothers; above this and not known to it the Order of Inter-
72 The Liberal Imagination
national Brothers, very few in number. James's Muniment,
we may suppose, is a National Brother.
For the indoctrination of his compact body of revolutionists,
Bakunin, in collaboration with the amazing Sergei Nechayev,
compiled The Revolutionary Catechism. This vade mecum
might be taken as a guidebook to The Princess Casamassima.
It instructs the revolutionist that he may be called to live in the
great world and to penetrate into any class of society: the aristocracy, the church, the army, the diplomatic corps. It tells
how one goes about compromising the wealthy in order to
command their wealth, just as the Princess is compromised.
There are instructions on how to deal with people who, like
James's Captain Sholto, are drawn to the movement by questionable motives; on how little one is to trust the women of
the upper classes who may be seeking sensation or salvation
the Princess calls it reality through revolutionary action. It
is a ruthless little book: eventually Bakunin himself complains
that nothing no private letter, no wife, no daughter is safe
from the conspiratorial zeal of his co-author Nechayev.
The situation in which Hyacinth involves himself, his
pledge to commit an assassination upon demand of the secret
leadership, is not the extreme fancy of a cloistered novelist,
but a classic anarchist situation. Anarchism could arouse mass
action, as in the riots at Lyon in 1882, but typically it showed
its power by acts of terror committed by courageous individuals glad to make personal war against society. Bakunin canonized for anarchism the Russian bandit Stenka Razin;
Balzac's Vautrin and Stendhal's Valbayre (of Lamiel] are prototypes of anarchist heroes. Always ethical as well as instrumental in its theory, anarchism conceived assassination not
only as a way of advertising its doctrine and weakening the
enemy's morale, but also as punishment or revenge or warning. Of the many assassinations or attempts at assassination that
fill the annals of the late years of the century, not all were anarchist, but those that were not were influenced by anarchist
The Princess Gasamassima 73
example. In 1878 there were two attempts on the life of the
Kaiser, one on the King of Spain, one on the King o Italy; in
1 880 another attempt on the King of Spain; in 1 88 1 Alexander
II of Russia was killed after many attempts; in 1882 the Phoenix Park murders were committed, Lord Frederick Cavendish,
Secretary for Ireland, and Undersecretary Thomas Burke being killed by extreme Irish nationalists; in 1883 there were
several dynamite conspiracies in Great Britain and in 1885
there was an explosion in the House of Commons; in 1883
there was an anarchist plot to blow up, all at once, the Emperor
Wilhelm, the Crown Prince, Bismarck, and Moltke. These are
but a few of the terroristic events of which James would have
been aware in the years just before he began The Princess
Casamassima, and later years brought many more.
Anarchism never established itself very firmly in England
as it did in Russia, France, and Italy. In these countries it penetrated to the upper classes. The actions of the Princess are not
unique for an aristocrat of her time, nor is she fabricating
when she speaks of her acquaintance with revolutionists of a
kind more advanced than Hyacinth is likely to know. In Italy
she would have met on terms of social equality such notable
anarchists as Count Carlo Cafiero and the physician Enrico
Malatesta, who was the son of a wealthy family. Kropotkin was
a descendant of the Ruriks and, as the novels of James's friend
Turgenev testify, extreme radicalism was not uncommon
among the Russian aristocracy. In France in the eighties and
still more markedly in the nineties there were artistic, intellectual, and even aristocratic groups which were closely involved with the anarchists.
The great revolutionary of The Princess Gasamassima is
Hoff endahl, whom we never see although we feel his real exist-
ence. Hoff endahl is, in the effect he has upon others, not unlike
what is told of Bakunin himself in his greatest days, when he
could enthrall with his passion even those who could not
understand the language he spoke in. But it is possible that
74 The Liberal Imagination
James also had the famous Johann Most in mind. Most figured
in the London press in 1881 when he was tried because his
newspaper, Freiheit, exulted in the assassination of the Czar.
He was found guilty of libel and inciting to murder and sentenced to sixteen months at hard labor. The jury that convicted
him recommended mercy on the ground that he was a foreigner and "might be suffering violent wrong." The jury was
right Most had suffered in the prisons of Germany after a
bitter youth. It is not clear whether he, like James's Hoffendahl, had had occasion to stand firm under police torture, but
there can be no doubt of his capacity to do so. After having
served his jail sentence, he emigrated to America, and it has
been said of him that terrorist activities in this country centered about him. He was implicated in the Haymarket Affair
and imprisoned for having incited the assassin of President
McKinley; Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were his
disciples, and they speak of him in language such as Hyacinth
uses of Hoffendahl. It is worth noting that Most was a bookbinder by trade.
In short, when we consider the solid accuracy of James's
political detail at every point, we find that we must give up the
notion that James could move only in the thin air of moral
abstraction. A writer has said of The Princess Casamassima
that it is "a capital example of James's impotence in matters
sociological/' The very opposite is'so. Quite apart from its
moral and aesthetic authority, The Princess Casamassima is
a brilliantly precise representation of social actuality.
IV
In his preface to The Princess in the New York Edition,
James tells us of a certain autobiographical element that went
into the creation of Hyacinth Robinson. "To find his possible
adventures interesting," James says, "I had only to conceive
his watching the same public show, the same innumerable ap-
The Princess Casamassima 75
pearances I had myself watched and of watching very much
as I had watched/'
This, at first glance, does not suggest a very intense connection between author and hero. But at least it assures us that at
some point the novel is touched by the author's fantasy about
himself. It is one of the necessities of successful modern story
that the author shall have somewhere entrusted his personal
fantasy to the tale; but it may be taken as very nearly a rule
that the more the author disguises the personal nature of his
fantasy, the greater its force will be. Perhaps he is best off if he
is not wholly aware that he is writing about himself at all: his
fantasy, like an actual dream, is powerful in the degree that its
"meaning" is hidden.
If Hyacinth does indeed express James's personal fantasy,
we are led to believe that the fantasy has reference to a familial
situation. James puts an insistent emphasis upon his hero's
small stature. Hyacinth's mere size is decisive in the story. It
exempts him from certain adult situations; for example, where
Paul Muniment overcomes the class barrier to treat the Princess as a woman, taking so full an account of her sexual existence and his own that we expect him to make a demand upon
her, Hyacinth is detached from the sexual possibility and disclaims it. The intention is not to show him as unmanly but as
too young to make the claims of maturity; he is the child of
the book, always the very youngest person. And this childman lives in a novel full of parental figures. Hyacinth has
no less than three sets of parents: Lord Frederick and
Florentine, Miss Pynsent and Mr. Vetch, Eustache Poupin
and Madame Poupin, and this is not to mention the Frenchrevolutionary grandfather and the arch-conspirator Hoffendahl; and even Millicent Henning appears, for one memorable
Sunday, in a maternal role. The decisive parental pair are, of
course, the actual parents, Lord Frederick and Florentine, who
represent some will feel too schematically the forces which
are in conflict in Hyacinth. Undertaking to kill the Duke as a
76 The Liberal Imagination
step in the destruction of the ruling class, Hyacinth is in effect
plotting the murder of his own father; and one reason that he
comes to loathe the pledged deed is his belief that, by repeating poor Florentine's action, he will be bringing his mother to
life in all her pitiful shame.
It is as a child that Hyacinth dies; that is, he dies of the withdrawal of love. James contrives with consummate skill the
lonely circumstance of Hyacinth's death. Nothing can equal
for delicacy of ironic pathos the incidents of the last part of
the book, in which Hyacinth, who has his own death warrant
in his pocket, the letter ordering the assassination, looks to his
adult friends for a reason of love which will explain why he
does not have to serve it on himself, or how, if he must serve
it, he can believe in the value of his deed. But the grown-up
people have occupations from which he is excluded and they
cannot believe in his seriousness. Paul Muniment and the
Princess push him aside, not unkindly, only condescendingly,
only as one tells a nice boy that there are certain things he cannot understand, such things as power and love and justification.
The adult world last represents itself to Hyacinth in the
great scene of lust in the department store. To make its point
the crueler, James has previously contrived for Hyacinth a
wonderful Sunday of church and park with Millicent Hen-
ning 2 ; Millicent enfolds Hyacinth in an undemanding, protective love that is not fine or delicate but for that reason so
much the more useful; but when in his last hunt for connec-
2 The reviewer for The Athenaeum remarked it as "an odd feature of
the
book that nearly all the action, or nearly all of which the date is
indicated, takes
place on Sundays." The observation was worth making, for it suggests
how
certain elements of the book's atmosphere are achieved: what better
setting for
loneliness and doubt than Sunday in a great city? And since the action
of
the book must depend on the working schedule of the working-class
characters, who, moreover, live at considerable distance from one another,
what
more natural than that they should meet on Sundays? But the reviewer
thinks
that "possibly a London week-day suggests a life too strenuous to be
lived by
the aimless beings whom Mr. James depicts/' The "aimless beings" note
was
one that was struck by most of the more-or-less liberal reviewers.
The Princess Casamassima 77
tion Hyacinth seeks out Millicent in her shop, he sees her
standing "still as a lay-figure" under Captain Sholto's gaze,
exhibiting "the long grand lines" of her body under pretense
of "modeling" a dress. And as Hyacinth sees the Captain's eyes
"travel up and down the front of Millicent's person," he knows
that he has been betrayed.
So much manipulation of the theme of parent and child, so
much interest in lost protective love, suggests that the connection of Hyacinth and his author may be more intense than
at first appears. And there is one consideration that reinforces
the guess that this fantasy of a child and his family has a par-
ticular and very personal relation to James in his own family
situation. The matter which is at issue in The Princess Casamassima^ the dispute between art and moral action, the controversy between the glorious unregenerate past and the
regenerate future, was not of merely general interest to Henry
James, nor, indeed, to any of the notable members of the
James family. Ralph Barton Perry in his Thought and Character of William James finds the question so real and troubling
in William's life that he devotes a chapter to it. William, to
whom the antithesis often represented itself as between
Europe-art and America-action, settled in favor of America
and action. Henry settled, it would seem, the other way
certainly in favor of art. But whether Henry's option necessarily involved, as William believed, a decision in favor of the
past, a love of the past for, as people like to say, the past's sake,
may be thought of as the essential matter of dispute between
William and Henry.
The dispute was at the very heart of their relationship.
They had the matter out over the years. But in the having-out
William was the aggressor, and it is impossible to suppose that
his statement of the case did not cause Henry pain. William
came to suspect that the preoccupation with art was very close
to immorality. He was perhaps not so wrong as the cliches in
defense of art would make him out to be; his real error lay in
78 The Liberal Imagination
his not knowing what art, as a thing to contemplate or as a
thing to make, implied for his brother. His suspicion extended
to Henry's work. He was by no means without sympathy for it,
but he thought that Henry's great gifts were being put at the
service of the finicking and refined; he was impatient of what
was not robust in the same way he was. Henry, we may be sure,
would never have wanted a diminution of the brotherly frankness that could tell him that The Bostonians might have been
very fine if it had been only a hundred pages long; but the
remark and others of similar sort could only have left his heart
a little sore.
When, then, we find Henry James creating for his Hyacinth
a situation in which he must choose between political action
and the fruits of the creative spirit of Europe, we cannot but
see that he has placed at the center of his novel a matter whose
interest is of the most personal kind. Its personal, its familial,
nature is emphasized by Alice James's share in the dispute, for
she and William were at one against their brother in aggressively holding a low view of England, and William's activism
finds a loud and even shrill echo in Alice, whose passionate
radicalism was, as Henry said of her, "her most distinguishing
feature." But far more important is the father's relation to the
family difference. The authority of the elder Henry James
could be fairly claimed by both his sons, for he was brilliantly
contradictory on the moral status of art. If William could come
to think of art as constituting a principle which was antagonistic to the principle of life, his father had said so before him.
And Henry could find abundant support for his own position
in his father's frequent use of the artist as one who, because he
seeks to create and not to possess, most closely approximates
in mankind the attributes of divinity.
The Princess Gasamassima may, then, be thought of as an
intensely autobiographical book, not in the sense of being the
author's personal record but in the sense of being his personal
act. For we may imagine that James, beautifully in control of
The Princess Casamassima 79
his novel, dominant in it as almost no decent person can be in
a family situation, is continuing the old dispute on his own
terms and even taking a revenge. Our imagination of the
"revenge" does not require that we attribute a debasing malice
to James quite to the contrary, indeed, for the revenge is
gentle and innocent and noble. It consists, this revenge, only
in arranging things in such a way that Paul Muniment and the
Princess shall stand for James's brother and sister and then
so to contrive events to show that, at the very moment when
this brilliant pair think they are closest to the conspiratorial
arcanum, the real thing, the true center, they are in actual fact
furthest from it. 3 Paul and the Princess believe themselves
to be in the confidence of Them, the People Higher Up, the
International Brothers, or whatever, when really they are held
in suspicion in these very quarters. They condescend to Hyacinth for his frivolous concern with art, but Hyacinth, unknown to them, has received his letter of fatal commission; he
has the death warrant in his pocket, another's and his own;
s When I say that Paul and the Princess "stand for" William and Alice, I
do not mean that they are portraits of William and Alice. It is true that,
in
the conditioning context of the novel, Paul suggests certain
equivalences with
William James: in his brisk masculinity, his intelligence, his downright
common sense and practicality, most of all in his relation to Hyacinth. What
we
may most legitimately guess to be a representation is the ratio of the
characters Paul: Hyacinth : : William: Henry. The Princess has Alice's radical
ideas; she is called "the most remarkable woman in Europe," which in
effect
is what Henry James said Alice would have been if the full exercise of
her
will and intellect had not been checked by her illness. But such
equivalence is
not portraiture and the novel is not a family toman a clef. And yet the
matter
of portraiture cannot be so easily settled, for it has been noticed by
those who
are acquainted with the life and character of Alice James that there are
many
points of similarity btween her and Rosy Muniment. Their opinions are,
to
be sure, at opposite poles, for Rosy is a staunch Tory and a dreadful
snob,
but the very patness of the opposition may reasonably be thought
significant.
In mind and pride of mind, in outspokenness, in will and the license
given to
will by illness, there is similarity between the sister of Paul and the
sister of
William and Henry. There is no reason why anyone interested in Henry
James
should not be aware of this, provided that it not be taken as the
negation of
Henry's expressed love for Alice and William provided, too, that it be
taken
as an aspect of his particular moral imagination, a matter which is
discussed
later.
80 The Liberal Imagination
despite his having given clear signs of lukewarmness to the
cause, he is trusted by the secret powers where his friends are
not. In his last days Hyacinth has become aware of his desire
no longer to bind books but to write them: the novel can be
thought of as Henry James's demonstrative message, to the
world in general, to his brother and sister in particular, that
the artist quite as much as any man of action carries his ultimate commitment and his death warrant in his pocket. "Life's
nothing/' Henry James wrote to a young friend, " unless
heroic and sacrificial/'
James even goes so far as to imply that the man of art may
be close to the secret center of things when the man of action
is quite apart from it. Yet Hyacinth cannot carry out the orders
of the people who trust him. Nor of course can he betray them
the pistol which, in the book's last dry words, "would certainly have served much better for the Duke," Hyacinth turns
upon himself. A vulgar and facile progressivism can find this
to be a proof of James's "impotence in matters sociological"
"the problem remains unsolved." Yet it would seem that a
true knowledge of society comprehends the reality of the social
forces it presumes to study and is aware of contradictions and
consequences; it knows that sometimes society offers an opposition of motives in which the antagonists are in such a balance
of authority and appeal that a man who so wholly perceives
them as to embody them in his very being cannot choose between them and is therefore destroyed. This is known as
tragedy.
We must not misunderstand the nature of Hyacinth's tragic
fate. Hyacinth dies sacrificially, but not as a sacrificial lamb,
wholly innocent; he dies as a human hero who has incurred a
certain amount of guilt.
The possibility of misunderstanding Hyacinth's situation
The Princess Casamassima 81
arises from our modern belief that the artist is one of the types
of social innocence. Our competitive, acquisitive society ritualistically condemns what it practices with us money gives
status, yet we consider a high regard for money a debasing
thing and we set a large value on disinterested activity. Hence
our cult of the scientist and the physician, who are presumed
to be free of the acquisitive impulses. The middle class, so far
as it is liberal, admires from varying distances the motives and
even the aims of revolutionists: it cannot imagine that revolutionists have anything to "gain" as the middle class itself
understands gain. And although sometimes our culture says
that the artist is a subversive idler, it is nowadays just as likely
to say that he is to be admired for his innocence, for his activity
is conceived as having no end beyond itself except possibly
some benign social purpose, such as "teaching people to understand each other."
But James did not see art as, in this sense, innocent. We
touch again on autobiography, for on this point there is a
significant connection between James's own life and Hyacinth's.
In Chapter xxv of A Small Boy and Others, his first autobi-
ographic volume, James tells how he was initiated into a
knowledge of style in the Galerie d'Apollon of the Louvre. As
James represents the event, the varieties of style in that gallery
assailed him so intensely that their impact quite transcended
aesthetic experience. For they seemed to speak to him not visually at all but in some "complicated sound" and as a "deafening chorus"; they gave him what he calls "a general sense of
glory." About this sense of glory he is quite explicit. "The
glory meant ever so many things at once, not only beauty and
art and supreme design, but history and fame and power, the
world in fine raised to the richest and noblest expression."
Hazlitt said that "the language of poetry naturally falls in
with the language of power," and goes on to develop an elaborate comparison between the processes of the imagination
82 The Liberal Imagination
and the processes of autocratic rule. He is not merely indulging in a flight of fancy or a fashion of speaking; no stancher
radical democrat ever lived than Hazlitt and no greater lover
of imaginative literature, yet he believed that poetry has an
affinity with political power in its autocratic and aristocratic
form and that it is not a friend of the democratic virtues. We
are likely not to want to agree with Hazlitt; we prefer to speak
of art as if it lived in a white bungalow with a garden, had a
wife and two children, and were harmless and quiet and cooperative. But James is of Hazlitt's opinion; his first great revelation of art came as an analogy with the triumphs of the
world; art spoke to him of the imperious will, with the music
of an army with banners. Perhaps it is to the point that James's
final act of imagination, as he lay dying, was to call his secretary
and give her as his last dictation what purported to be an
autobiographical memoir by Napoleon Bonaparte,
But so great an aggression must carry some retribution with
it, and as James goes on with the episode of the Galerie d' Apollon, he speaks of the experience as having the effect not only
of a "love-philtre" but also of a ''fear-philtre/' Aggression
brings guilt and then fear. And James concludes the episode
with the account of a nightmare in which the Galerie figures;
he calls it "the most appalling and yet most admirable" nightmare of his life. He dreamed that he was defending himself
from an intruder, trying to keep the door shut against a terrible invading form; then suddenly there came "the great
thought that I, in my appalled state, was more appalling than
the awful agent, creature or presence"; whereupon he opened
the door and, surpassing the invader for "straight aggression
and dire intention/' pursued him down a long corridor in a
great storm of lighting and thunder; the corridor was seen to
be the Galerie d'Apollon. We do not have to presume very
far to find the meaning in the dream, for James gives us all
that we might want; he tells us that the dream was important
to him, that, having experienced art as "history and fame and
The Princess Casamassima 83
power/' his arrogation seemed a guilty one and represented
itself as great fear which he overcame by an inspiration of
straight aggression and dire intention and triumphed in the
very place where he had had his imperious fantasy. An admirable nightmare indeed. One needs to be a genius to counterattack nightmare; perhaps this is the definition of genius.
When James came to compose Hyacinth's momentous letter
from Venice, the implications of the analogue of art with
power had developed and become clearer and more objective.
Hyacinth has had his experience of the glories of Europe, and
when he writes to the Princess his view of human misery is
matched by a view of the world "raised to the richest and
noblest expression." He understands no less clearly than before "the despotisms, the cruelties, the exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past." But now he recognizes that
"the fabric of civilization as we know it" is inextricably bound
up with this injustice; the monuments of art and learning and
taste have been reared upon coercive power. Yet never before
has he had the full vision of what the human spirit can accomplish to make the world "less impracticable and life more
tolerable." He finds that he is ready to fight for art and what
art suggests of glorious life against the low and even hostile
estimate which his revolutionary friends have made of it, and
this involves of course some reconciliation with established
coercive power.
It is easy enough, by certain assumptions, to condemn Hyacinth and even to call him names. But first we must see what
his position really means and what heroism there is in it. Hyacinth recognizes what very few people wish to admit, that
civilization has a price, and a high one. Civilizations differ from
one another as much in what they give up as in what they acquire; but all civilizations are alike in that they renounce
something for something else. We do right to protest this in
any given case that comes under our notice and we do right to
get as much as possible for as little as possible; but we can
84 The Liberal Imagination
never get everything for nothing. Nor, indeed, do we really
imagine that we can. Thus, to stay within the present context,
every known theory o popular revolution gives up the vision
of the world "raised to the richest and noblest expression." To
achieve the ideal of widespread security, popular revolutionary theory condemns the ideal of adventurous experience. It
tries to avoid doing this explicitly and it even, although seldom convincingly, denies that it does it at all. But all the instincts or necessities of radical democracy are against the
superbness and arbitrariness which often mark great spirits.
It is sometimes said in the interests of an ideal or abstract completeness that the choice need not be made, that security can
be imagined to go with richness and nobility of expression.
But we have not seen it in the past and nobody really strives
to imagine it in the future. Hyacinth's choice is made under
the pressure of the counterchoice made by Paul and the Princess; their "general rectification" implies a civilization from
which the idea of life raised to the richest and noblest expression will quite vanish.
There have been critics who said that Hyacinth is a snob and
the surrogate of James's snobbery. But if Hyacinth is a snob,
he is of the company of Rabelais, Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens,
Balzac, and Lawrence, men who saw the lordliness and establishment of the aristocrat and the gentleman as the proper
condition for the spirit of man, and who, most of them, demanded it for themselves, as poor Hyacinth never does, for
"it was not so much that he wished to enjoy as that he wished
to know; his desire was not to be pampered but to be initiated."
His snobbery is no other than that of John Stuart Mill when
he discovered that a grand and spacious room could have so enlarging an effect upon his mind; when Hyacinth at Medley had
his first experience of a great old house, he admired nothing
so much as the ability of a thing to grow old without loss but
rather with gain of dignity and interest; "the spectacle of long
duration unassociated with some sordid infirmity or poverty
The Princess Casamassima 85
was new to him; for he had lived with people among whom old
age meant, for the most part, a grudged and degraded survival." Hyacinth has Yeats's awareness of the dream that a
great house embodies, that here the fountain of life "overflows
without ambitious pains,"
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.
But no less than Yeats he has the knowledge that the rich man
who builds the house and the architect and artists who plan
and decorate it are "bitter and violent men" and that the great
houses "but take our greatness with our violence" and our
"greatness with our bitterness." 4
By the time Hyacinth's story draws to its end, his mind is in
a perfect equilibrium, not of irresolution but of awareness.
His sense of the social horror of the world is not diminished
by his newer sense of the glory of the world. On the contrary,
just as his pledge of his life to the revolutionary cause had in
effect freed him to understand human glory, so the sense of the
glory quickens his response to human misery never, indeed,
is he so sensitive to the sordid life of the mass of mankind as
after he has had the revelation of art. And just as he is in an
equilibrium of awareness, he is also in an equilibrium of guilt.
He has learned something of what may lie behind abstract
ideals, the envy, the impulse to revenge and to dominance. He
is the less inclined to forgive what he sees because, as we must
remember, the triumph of the revolution presents itself to
him as a certainty and the act of revolution as an ecstasy. There
is for him as little doubt of the revolution's success as there is
of the fact that his mother had murdered his father. And when
he thinks of revolution, it is as a tremendous tide, a colossal
4 "Ancestral Houses" in Collected Poems. The whole poem may be read
as a
most illuminating companion-piece to The Princess Casamassima.
86 The Liberal Imagination
force; he is tempted to surrender to it as an escape from his
isolation one would be lifted by it "higher on the suntouched billows than one could ever be by a lonely effort of
one's own." But if the revolutionary passion thus has its guilt,
Hyacinth's passion for life at its richest and noblest is no less
guilty. It leads him to consent to the established coercive
power of the world, and this can never be innocent. One cannot "accept" the suffering of others, no matter for what ideal,
no matter if one's own suffering be also accepted, without incurring guilt. It is the guilt in which every civilization is implicated.
Hyacinth's death, then, is not his way of escaping from irresolution. It is truly a sacrifice, an act of heroism. He is a hero
of civilization because he dares do more than civilization does:
embodying two ideals at once, he takes upon himself, in full
consciousness, the guilt of each. He acknowledges both his
parents. By his death he instructs us in the nature of civilized
life and by his consciousness he transcends it.
VI
Suppose that truth be the expression, not of intellect, nor
even, as we sometimes now think, of will, but of love. It is an
outmoded idea, and yet if it has still any force at all it will
carry us toward an understanding of the truth of The Princess
Casamassima. To be sure, the legend of James does not associate him with love; indeed, it is a fact symptomatic of the
condition of American letters that Sherwood Anderson, a
writer who himself spoke much of love, was able to say of
James that he was the novelist of "those who hate." Yet as we
read The Princess Casamassima it is possible to ask whether
any novel was ever written which, dealing with decisive moral
action and ultimate issues, makes its perceptions and its judgments with so much loving-kindness.
Since James wrote, we have had an increasing number of
The Princess Casamassima 87
novels which ask us to take cognizance of those whom we call
the underprivileged. These novels are of course addressed to
those of us who have the money and the leisure to buy books
and read them and the security to assail our minds with accounts of the miseries of our fellow men; on the whole, the
poor do not read about the poor. And in so far as the middle
class has been satisfied and gratified by the moral implications
of most of these books, it is not likely to admire Henry James's
treatment of the poor. For James represents the poor as if they
had dignity and intelligence in the same degree as people of
the reading class. More, he assumes this and feels no need to
insist that it is so. This is a grace of spirit that we are so little
likely to understand that we may resent it. Few of our novelists
are able to write about the poor so as to make them something
more than the pitied objects of our facile sociological minds.
The literature of our liberal democracy pets and dandles its
underprivileged characters, and, quite as if it had the right to
do so, forgives them what faults they may have. But James is
sure that in such people, who are numerous, there are the usual
human gradations of understanding, interest, and goodness.
Even if my conjecture about the family connection of the
novel be wholly mistaken, it will at least suggest what is unmistakably true, that James could write about a workingman
quite as if he were as large, willful, and complex as the author
of The Principles of Psychology. At the same time that everything in the story of The Princess Casamassima is based on
social difference, everything is also based on the equality of
the members of the human family. People at the furthest extremes of class are easily brought into relation because they
are all contained in the novelist's affection. In that context it
is natural for the Princess and Lady Aurora Langrish to make
each other's acquaintance by the side of Rosy Muniment's bed
and to contend for the notice of Paul. That James should
create poor people so proud and intelligent as to make it impossible for anyone, even the reader who has paid for the
88 The Liberal Imagination
privilege, to condescend to them, so proud and intelligent indeed that it is not wholly easy for them to be "good," is, one
ventures to guess, an unexpressed, a never-to-be-expressed
reason for finding him "impotent in matters sociological." We
who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our
equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
But James's special moral quality, his power of love, is not
wholly comprised by his impulse to make an equal distribution of dignity among his characters. It goes beyond this to
create his unique moral realism, his particular gift of human
understanding. If in his later novels James, as many say he did,
carried awareness of human complication to the point of
virtuosity, he surely does not do so here, and yet his knowledge
of complication is here very considerable. But this knowledge
is not an analytical one, or not in the usual sense in which that
word is taken, which implies a cool dissection. If we imagine
a father of many children who truly loves them all, we may
suppose that he will see very vividly their differences from
one another, for he has no wish to impose upon them a similarity which would be himself; and he will be quite willing to
see their faults, for his affection leaves him free to love them,
not because they are faultless but because they are they; yet
while he sees their faults he will be able, from long connection
and because there is no reason to avoid the truth, to perceive
the many reasons for their actions. The discriminations and
modifications of such a man would be enormous, yet the moral
realism they would constitute would not arise from an analytical intelligence as we usually conceive it but from love.
The nature of James's moral realism may most easily be
exemplified by his dealings with the character of Rosy Muniment. Rosy is in many ways similar to Jennie Wren, the dolls'
dressmaker of Our Mutual Friend; both are crippled, courageous, quaint, sharp-tongued, and dominating, and both are
admired by the characters among whom they have their existence. Dickens unconsciously recognizes the cruelty that lies
The Princess Casamassima 89
hidden in Jennie, but consciously he makes nothing more than
a brusque joke o her habit of threatening people's eyes with
her needle. He allows himself to be deceived and is willing to
deceive us. But James manipulates our feelings about Rosy
into a perfect ambivalence. He forces us to admire her courage,
pride, and intellect and seems to forbid us to take account of
her cruelty because she directs it against able-bodied or aristocratic people. Only at the end does he permit us the release
of our ambivalence the revelation that Hyacinth doesn't like
Rosy and that we don't have to is an emotional relief and a
moral enlightenment. But although we by the author's express
permission are free to dislike Rosy, the author does not avail
himself of the same privilege. In the family of the novel Rosy's
status has not changed.
Moral realism is the informing spirit of The Princess Casamassima and it yields a kind of social and political knowledge
which is hard to come by. It is at work in the creation of the
character of Millicent Henning, whose strength, affectionateness, and warm sensuality move James to the series of remarkable prose arias in her praise which punctuate the book; yet
while he admires her, he knows the particular corruptions
which our civilization is working upon her, for he is aware not
only of her desire to pull down what is above her but also of
her desire to imitate and conform to it and to despise what
she herself is. Millicent is proud of doing nothing with her
hands, she despises Hyacinth because he is so poor in spirit
as to consent to make things and get dirty in the process, and
she values herself because she does nothing less genteel than
exhibit what others have made; and in one of the most pregnant scenes of the book James involves her in the peculiarly
corrupt and feeble sexuality which is associated in our culture
with exhibiting and looking at luxurious objects.
But it is in the creation of Paul Muniment and the Princess
that James's moral realism shows itself in fullest power. If we
seek an explanation of why The Princess Casamassima was not
go The Liberal Imagination
understood in its own day, we find it in the fact that the significance of this remarkable pair could scarcely have emerged
for the reader of 1886. But we of today can say that they and
their relationship constitute one of the most masterly comments on modern life that has ever been made.
In Paul Muniment a genuine idealism coexists with a secret
desire for personal power. It is one of the brilliances of the
novel that his ambition is never made explicit. Rosy's remark
about her brother, "What my brother really cares for well,
one of these days, when you know you'll tell me," is perhaps
as close as his secret ever comes to statement. It is conveyed to
us by his tone, as a decisive element of his charm, for Paul
radiates what the sociologists, borrowing the name from theology, call charisma, the charm of power, the gift of leadership.
His natural passion for power must never become explicit, for
it is one of the beliefs of our culture that power invalidates
moral purpose. The ambiguity of Paul Muniment has been
called into being by the nature of modern politics in so far as
they are moral and idealistic. For idealism has not changed
the nature of leadership, but it has forced the leader to change
his nature, requiring him to present himself as a harmless and
self-abnegating man. It is easy enough to speak of this ambiguity as a form of hypocrisy, yet the opposition between morality
and power from which it springs is perfectly well conceived.
But even if well conceived, it is endlessly difficult to execute
and it produces its own particular confusions, falsifications,
and even lies. The moral realist sees it as the source of characteristically modern ironies, such as the liberal exhausting
the scrupulosity which made him deprecate all power and becoming extravagantly tolerant of what he had once denounced,
or the idealist who takes license from his ideals for the unrestrained exercise of power.
The Princess, as some will remember, is the Christina Light
of James's earlier novel, Roderick Hudson, and she considers,
as Madame Grandoni says of her, "that in the darkest hour of
The Princess Casamassima 91
her life, she sold herself for a title and a fortune. She regards
her doing so as such a terrible piece of frivolity that she can
never for the rest of her days be serious enough to make up for
it." Seriousness has become her ruling passion, and in the great
sad comedy of the story it is her fatal sin, for seriousness is not
exempt from the tendency of ruling passions to lead to error.
And yet it has an aspect of heroism, this hunt of hers for reality,
for a strong and final basis of life. "Then it's real, it's solid!"
she exclaims when Hyacinth tells her that he has seen Hoff endahl and has penetrated to the revolutionary holy of holies. It
is her quest for reality that leads her to the poor, to the verypoorest poor she can find, and that brings a light of joy to her
eye at any news of suffering or deprivation, which must surely
be, if anything is, an irrefrangible reality. As death and danger
are her interest in Hyacinth is made the more intense by his
pledged death, and she herself eventually wants to undertake
the mortal mission. A perfect drunkard of reality, she is ever
drawn to look for stronger and stronger drams.
Inevitably, of course, the great irony of her fate is that the
more passionately she seeks reality and the happier she becomes in her belief that she is close to it, the further removed
she is. Inevitably she must turn away from Hyacinth because
she reads his moral seriousness as frivolousness; and inevitably she is led to Paul who, as she thinks, affirms her in a morality which is as real and serious as anything can be, an absolute
morality which gives her permission to devaluate and even
destroy all that she has known of human good because it has
been connected with her own frivolous, self-betraying past.
She cannot but mistake the nature of reality, for she believes
it is a thing, a position, a finality, a bedrock. She is, in short,
the very embodiment of the modern will which masks itself
in virtue, making itself appear harmless, the will that hates
itself and finds its manifestations guilty and is able to exist
only if it operates in the name of virtue, that despises the
variety and modulations of the human story and longs for an
92 The Liberal Imagination
absolute humanity, which is but another way of saying a nothingness. In her alliance with Paul she constitutes a striking
symbol o that powerful part of modern culture that exists by
means of its claim to political innocence and by its false
seriousness the political awareness that is not aware, the
social consciousness which hates full consciousness, the moral
earnestness which is moral luxury.
The fatal ambiguity of the Princess and Paul is a prime condition of Hyacinth Robinson's tragedy. If we comprehend the
complex totality that James has thus conceived, we understand
that the novel is an incomparable representation of the spiritual circumstances of our civilization. I venture to call it incomparable because, although other writers have provided
abundant substantiation of James's insight, no one has, like
him, told us the truth in a single luminous act of creation. If
we ask by what magic James was able to do what he did, the
answer is to be found in what I have identified as the source
of James's moral realism. For the novelist can tell the truth
about Paul and the Princess only if, while he represents them
in their ambiguity and error, he also allows them to exist in
their pride and beauty: the moral realism that shows the ambiguity and error cannot refrain from showing the pride and
beauty. Its power to tell the truth arises from its power of love.
James had the imagination of disaster and that is why he is
immediately relevant to us; but together with the imagination
of disaster he had what the imagination of disaster often
destroys and in our time is daily destroying, the imagination
of love.
The Function
of the Little Magazine
The Partisan Reader may be thought of as an ambiguous
monument. It commemorates a victory Partisan Review has
survived for a decade, and has survived with a vitality of which
the evidence may be found in the book which marks the anniversary. Yet to celebrate the victory is to be at once aware of
the larger circumstance of defeat in which it was gained. For
what we speak of as if it were a notable achievement is no more
than this: that a magazine which has devoted itself to the publication of good writing of various kinds has been able to continue in existence for ten years and has so far established itself
that its audience now numbers some six thousand readers. 1
Here is an epitome of our cultural situation. Briefly put, it
is that there exists a great gulf between our educated class and
the best of our literature.
I use the word educated in its commonest sense to indicate
those people who value their ability to live some part of their
lives with serious ideas. I limit the case to these people and do
not refer to the great mass of people because that would involve us in an ultimate social question and I have in mind only
the present cultural question. And I do not mean to assert
that Partisan Review in itself contains the best of our literature, but only that it is representative of some of the tendencies
that are producing the best.
Note: This essay was first published as the introduction to The Partisan
Reader:
Ten Years of Partisan Review, 1933-1944: An Anthology, edited by
William
Phillips and Philip Rahv (New York: The Dial Press, 1946).
i Four years later the number has risen to ten thousand.
93
94 The Liberal Imagination
The great gulf to which I refer did not open suddenly. Some
fifty years ago, William Dean Howells observed that the
readers of the "cultivated" American magazines were mark-
edly losing interest in literary contributions. Howells is here
a useful witness, not only because he had his finger in so many
important literary pies and was admirably aware of the economics and sociology of literature, but also because he himself
was an interesting example of the literary culture whose
decline he was noting. The Ohio of Howells' boyhood had
only recently emerged from its frontier phase and in its manner of life it was still what we would call primitive. Yet in this
Ohio, while still a boy, Howells had devoted himself to the
literary life. He was unusual but he was not unique or lonely;
he had friends who also felt called to literature or scholarship.
His elders did not think the young man strange. Literature
had its large accepted place in this culture. The respectable
lawyers of the locality subscribed to the great British quarterlies. The printing office of How r ells' father was the resort of
the village wits, who, as the son tells us, ' 'dropped in, and liked
to stand with their backs to the stove and challenge opinion
concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and Macaulay, Pope and
Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare/' Problems of morality and
religious faith were freely and boldly discussed. There was no
intellectual isolationism, and the village felt, at least eventually, the reverberations of the European movement of mind,
Howells learned an adequate German from the German settlers and became a disciple of Heine. The past was alive, and
the boy, rooting in a barrel of books in his father's log cabin,
found much to read about old Spain at the age of fifteen,
having conceived a passion for Don Quixote, he vowed to
write the life of Cervantes. At the outbreak of the Civil War,
when Howells was twenty-three, Abraham Lincoln, wishing
to reward the young author for a campaign biography, offered
him, at the instance of John Hay and the urging of the Ohio
politicians, the consulship at Venice. It was then the common
The Function of the Little Magazine 95
practice to place literary men in foreign diplomatic posts.
I am not trying to paint an idyllic picture of the literary life
of our nineteenth century. It was a life full of social anomaly
and economic hardship. I am only trying to suggest that in the
culture of the time literature was assumed. What was true of
Howells in Ohio was also true of Mark Twain in Missouri.
Nothing could be falser than the view that Mark Twain was a
folk writer. Like his own Tom Sawyer, he was literate and
literary to the core, even snobbishly so. The local literary
culture that he loved to mock, the graveyard poetry, the foolish
Byronism, the adoration of Scott, was the literature of the
London drawing rooms naturalized as a folk fact in Missouri.
We were once a nation that took its cultural stand on the intense literariness of McGuffey's Eclectic Readers. When Oscar
Wilde and Matthew Arnold came here on tour, they may have
figured chiefly as curiosities, but at least these literary men
were nothing less than that.
In the nineteenth century, in this country as in Europe, literature underlay every activity of mind. The scientist, the
philosopher, the historian, the theologian, the economist, the
social theorist, and even the politician, w r ere required to com-
mand literary abilities which would now be thought irrelevant
to their respective callings. The man of original ideas spoke
directly to "the intelligent public/' to the lawyer, the doctor,
the merchant, and even and much more than now, as is suggested by the old practice of bringing out very cheap editions
of important books to the working masses. The role of the
"popularizer" was relatively little known; the originator of an
idea was expected to make his own full meaning clear.
Of two utterances of equal quality, one of the nineteenth
and one of the twentieth century, we can say that the one of
the nineteenth century had the greater power. If the mechanical means of communication were then less efficient than now,
the intellectual means were far more efficient. There may even
be a significant ratio between the two. Perhaps, as John Dos.
96 The Liberal Imagination
Passes has suggested, where books and ideas are relatively rare,
true literacy may be higher than where they are superabundant. 2 At any rate, it was the natural expectation that a serious
idea would be heard and considered. Baudelaire is the poet
from whom our modern disowned poets have taken their
characteristic attitudes, yet Baudelaire himself was still able
to think of "success," to believe in the possibility of being
seriously listened to by the very society he flouted, and he even
carried his belief to the point of standing for election to the
Academy.
This power of the word, this power of the idea, we no longer
count on in the same degree. It is now more than twenty years
since a literary movement in this country has had what I have
called power. The literary movement of social criticism of the
igso's is not finally satisfying, but it had more energy to advance our civilization than anything we can now see, and its
effects were large and good. No tendency since has had an
equal strength. The falling off from this energy may not be
permanent. It could, of course, become permanent. There are
circumstances that suggest it might become so. After all, the
emotional space of the human mind is large but not infinite,
and perhaps it will be pre-empted by the substitutes for literature the radio, the movies, and certain magazines which
are antagonistic to literature not merely because they are competing genres but also because of the political and cultural
assumptions that control them. Further, the politics with
which we are now being confronted may be of such kind as to
crush the possibility of that interplay between free will and
2 This seems to be borne out not only by the great example of Lincoln's
prose, but also by the assumptions of the humorous writers, by the
style of
the newspapers of the day, by the letters of people who read very few
books
see, for instance, the letter which Mark Twain's father wrote his son to
give
him the gist of a course he had taken with a traveling professor of
grammar
and rhetoric. The command of language was believed to be one of the
means
by which one could become a person of standing and effectiveness. The
tradition of American oratory is now only comic, yet perhaps the verbal
ritual of
the Fourth of July was the tribute paid by simplicity to intellect.
The Function of the Little Magazine 97
circumstance upon which all literature depends. These conditions can scarcely encourage us. On the other hand, they
must not be allowed to obsess us so that we cannot work. They
involve ultimate considerations, and, apart from the fact that
it is always futile to make predictions about culture, the practical activity of literature requires that a sense of the present
moment be kept paramount.
To the general lowering of the status of literature and of
the interest in it, the innumerable "little magazines" have
been a natural and heroic response. Since the beginning of the
century, meeting difficulties of which only their editors can
truly conceive, they have tried to keep the roads open. From
the elegant and brilliant Dial to the latest little scrub from the
provinces, they have done their work, they haye kept our culture from being cautious and settled, or merely sociological,
or merely pious. They are snickered at and snubbed, sometimes deservedly, and no one would venture to say in a precise
way just what effect they have except that they keep the new
talents warm until the commercial publisher with his customary air of noble resolution is ready to take his chance, except
that they make the official representatives of literature a little
uneasy, except that they keep a countercurrent moving which
perhaps no one will be fully aware of until it ceases to move.
Among these magazines, these private and precarious ventures, Partisan Review does a work that sets it apart. Although
it is a magazine of literary experiment, it differs from the other
little magazines in the emphasis it puts upon ideas and intellectual attitudes. And to understand its special role in our
culture, we must further particularize the cultural situation
I have described; we must become aware of the discrepancy
that exists between the political beliefs of our educated class
and the literature that, by its merit, should properly belong
to that class.
In its political feeling our educated class is predominantly
liberal. Attempts to define liberalism are not likely to meet
98 The Liberal Imagination
with success I mean only that our educated class has a ready
if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress,
science, social legislation, planning, and international cooperation, perhaps especially where Russia is in question. These
beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs then on our way of holding them,
that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these
ideas, and the emotions that are consonant with them, in a
great literary way.
Our liberal ideology has produced a large literature of social
and political protest, but not, for several decades, a single
writer who commands our real literary admiration; we all
respond to the flattery of agreement, but perhaps even the
simplest reader among us knows in his heart the difference between that emotion and the real emotions of literature. It is
a striking fact about this literature of contemporary liberalism
that it is commercially very successful at the behest of the
liberal middle class, that old vice of "commercialism," which
we all used to scold, is now at a disadvantage before the "integrity" which it once used to corrupt. Our dominant literature is profitable in the degree that it is earnest, sincere,
solemn. At its best it has the charm of a literature of piety. It
has neither imagination nor mind.
And if on the other hand we name those writers who, by the
general consent of the most serious criticism, by consent too of
the very class of educated people of which we speak, are to be
thought of as the monumental figures of our time, we see that
to these writers the liberal ideology has been at best a matter
of indifference. Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Mann
(in his creative work), Kafka, Rilke, Gide all have their own
love of justice and the good life, but in not one of them does
it take the form of a love of the ideas and emotions which
liberal democracy, as known by our educated class, has declared respectable. So that we can say that no connection exists
between our liberal educated class and the best of the literary
The Function of the Little Magazine 99
mind o our time. And this is to say that there is no connection
between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep
places of the imagination. The same fatal separation is to be
seen in the tendency of our educated liberal class to reject the
tough, complex psychology of Freud for the easy rationalistic
optimism of Horney and Fromm.
The alienation of the educated class from the most impressive literature of our time has of course been noted before.
And certain critics have been eager to attribute the lack of
connection to the literal difficulty of the writers themselves
and to blame this difficulty on the writers' intellectual snobbishness and irresponsibility; as the war approached they even
went so far as to regard as subversive to democracy all writers
who did not, as one of them put it, "turn away from the preferences of the self-appointed few, and toward the needs and desires of the many/' One might be the more willing to accept
this diagnosis if the critics who made it were more adept in
their understanding of what, after all, a good many people can
understand, or if they were not so very quick to give all their
sympathy and all their tolerance to works of an obviously inferior sort merely because they are easy to read, and "affirmative," and "life-giving," and written for the needs and desires
of the many. If tolerance is in question, I am inclined rather to
suppose that it should go to those writers from whom, what-
ever their difficulty, we hear the unmistakable note of seriousness a note which, when we hear it, should suggest to us that
those who sound it are not devoting their lives to committing
literary suicide.
It would be futile to offer a diagnosis which would go
counter to the one of literary snobbery and irresponsibility,
a diagnosis which would undertake, perhaps, to throw the
blame for the cultural situation upon the quality of the education of our educated class, or upon the political intelligence
of this class. The situation is too complex and too important for
so merely contentious a procedure. Neither blame nor flattery
ioo The Liberal Imagination
can do anything to close the breach that I have described.
But to organize a new union between our political ideas and
our imagination in all our cultural purview there is no work
more necessary. It is to this work that Partisan Review has devoted itself for more than a decade.
It is of some importance that Partisan Review began its
career as an organ which, in the cultural field, was devoted to
the interests of the Communist Party. Considering it for the
moment quite apart from politics, the cultural program of the
Communist Party in this country has, more than any other
single intellectual factor, given the license to that divorce between politics and the imagination of which I have spoken.
Basing itself on a great act of mind and on a great faith in
mind, it has succeeded in rationalizing intellectual limitation
and has, in twenty years, produced not a single work of distinction or even of high respectability. After Partisan Review
had broken with the Communist Party, some large part of its
own intellectual vitality came from its years of conflict with
Communist culture at a time when our educated class, in its
guilt and confusion, was inclined to accept in serious good
faith the cultural leadership of the Party. In recent years the
political intensity of Partisan Review has somewhat diminished, yet its political character remains.
As it should remain, because our fate, for better or worse,
is political. It is therefore not a happy fate, even if it has an
heroic sound, but there is no escape from it, and the only possibility of enduring it is to force into our definition of politics
every human activity and every subtlety of every human activity. There are manifest dangers in doing this, but greater dangers in not doing it. Unless we insist that politics is imagination
and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind that we will not like. Partisan Review has
conceived its particular function to be the making of this
necessary insistence, and within its matrix of politics it has
wished to accommodate the old and the new, the traditional
The Function of the Little Magazine 101
and the experimental, the religious and the positivistic, the
hopeful and the despairing. In its implicit effort to bring
about the union of the political idea with the imagination, it
has drawn on a wider range of human interests and personality
than any other cultural periodical of our time. And yet it has
its own clear unity: it is the unity conferred on diversity by intelligence and imagination.
But if we grant the importance of the work, we are bound
to ask how effectively it can be carried out by a magazine of
this kind and of similar circulation. We are dealing again
with power. The question of power has not always preoccupied
literature. And ideally it is not the question which should first
come to mind in thinking about literature. Quality is the first,
and perhaps should be the only, consideration. But in our
situation today, when we think of quality, we must ask what
chance a particular quality has to survive, and how it can be a
force to act in its own defense and in the defense of those social
circumstances which will permit it to establish and propagate
itself in the world. This is not a desirable state of affairs. "Art
is a weapon" and "Ideas are weapons" were phrases that a few
years ago had a wide and happy currency; and sometimes, as
we look at the necessities of our life, we have the sense that the
weapon metaphor all too ruthlessly advances food is now a
weapon, sleep and love will soon be weapons, and our final
slogan perhaps will be, "Life is a weapon." And yet the question of power is forced upon us.
At least let us not fall into the temptations it always offers,
of grossness and crudeness. The critics to whom I have referred
yield to these temptations when they denounce the coterie and
the writer who does not write for "the many/* The matter is
not so simple as these earnest minds would have it. From the
democratic point of view, we must say that in a true democracy
nothing should be done /or the people. The writer who defines
his audience by its limitations is indulging in the unforgivable
arrogance. The writer must define his audience by its abilities,
1O2 The Liberal Imagination
by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He
does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate
reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors,
or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer
serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that
does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served
is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.
The word coterie should not frighten us too much. Neither
should it charm us too much; writing for a small group does
not insure integrity any more than writing for the many; the
coterie can corrupt as surely, and sometimes as quickly, as the
big advertising appropriation. But the smallness of the coterie
does not limit the "human" quality of the work. Some coterie
authors will no doubt always be difficult and special, like
Donne and Hopkins; but this says nothing of their humanity.
The populist critics seem to deny the possibility of broad
humanity to those who do not have a large audience in mind,
yet the writers they would cite as exemplifying breadth of
humanity did not themselves feel that the effect of their imagination depended on the size of their audience. "Very bookish, this housebred man. His work smells of the literary
coterie" this is T, E. Shaw's opinion of the author of the
Odyssey. Chaucer wrote for a small court group; Shakespeare,
as his sonnets show, had something of the aspect of the coterie
poet; Milton \vas content that his audience be few, although
he insisted that it be fit. The Romanticists wrote for a handful while the nation sneered. Dostoevski wrote for a journal
that considered that it was doing well when its subscribers
numbered four thousand. And our Whitman, now the often
unread symbol of the democratic life, was through most of
his career the poet of what was even less than a coterie.
This stale argument should not have to be offered at all,
and it is a grim portent of our cultural situation that, in the
name of democracy, critics should dare attempt to make it
the sign of a poet's shame that he is not widely read.
The Function of the Little Magazine 103
When we try to estimate the power of literature, we must
not be misled by the fancy pictures of history. Now and then
periods do occur when the best literature overflows its usual
narrow bounds and reaches a large mass of the people. Athens
had such a period and we honor it for that. The nineteenth
century also had this kind of overflowing. It is what we must
always hope for and work for. But in actual fact the occasions are rare when the best literature becomes, as it were,
the folk literature, and generally speaking literature has always been carried on within small limits and under great
difficulties. Most people do not like the loneliness and the
physical quiescence of the activity of contemplation, and
many do not have the time or the spirit left for it. But whenever it becomes a question of measuring the power of literature, Shelley's old comment recurs, and "it exceeds all
imagination to conceive what would have been the moral con-
dition of the world" if literature did not continue in existence
with its appeal to limited groups, keeping the road open.
This does not answer the question of a period like ours
when a kind of mechanical literacy is spreading more and
more, when more and more people insist, as they should,
on an equality of cultural status and are in danger of being
drawn to what was called by Tocqueville, who saw the situation in detail a century ago, the "hypocrisy of luxury," the
satisfaction with the thing that looks like the real thing but
is not the real thing. A magazine with six thousand readers
cannot seem very powerful here, and yet to rest with this
judgment would be to yield far too easily to the temptations of grossness and crudeness which appear whenever the
question of power is raised. We must take into account what
would be our moral and political condition if the impulse
which such a magazine represents did not exist, the impulse
to make sure that the daemon and the subject are served,
the impulse to insist that the activity of politics be united
with the imagination under the aspect of mind.
Huckleberry Finn
In 1876 Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer and in the same year began what he called "another
boys' book." He set little store by the new venture and said
that he had undertaken it "more to be at work than anything
else." His heart was not in it "I like it only tolerably well
as far as I have got," he said, "and may possibly pigeonhole
or burn the MS when it is done." He pigeonholed it long
before it was done and for as much as four years. In 1880 he
took it out and carried it forward a little, only to abandon it
again. He had a theory of unconscious composition and believed that a book must write itself; the book which he referred to as "Huck Finn's Autobiography" refused to do the
job of its own creation and he would not coerce it.
But then in the summer of 1887 Mark Twain was possessed
by a charge of literary energy which, as he wrote to Howells,
was more intense than any he had experienced for many years.
He worked all day and every day, and periodically he so
fatigued himself that he had to recruit his strength by a day
or two of smoking and reading in bed. It is impossible not
to suppose that this great creative drive was connected with
was perhaps the direct result of the visit to the Mississippi
he had made earlier in the year, the trip which forms the
matter of the second part of Life on the Mississippi. His boyhood and youth on the river he so profoundly loved had been
at once the happiest and most significant part of Mark
Twain's life; his return to it in middle age stirred memo-
104
Huckleberry Finn iof
ries which revived and refreshed the idea of Huckleberry
Finn. Now at last the book was not only ready but eager tc
write itself. But it was not to receive much conscious help
from its author. He was always full of second-rate literary
schemes and now, in the early weeks of the summer, witt
Huckleberry Finn waiting to complete itself, he turned his
hot energy upon several of these sorry projects, the comple
tion of which gave him as much sense of satisfying productivity as did his eventual absorption in Huckleberry Finn.
When at last Huckleberry Finn was completed and pub
lished and widely loved, Mark Twain became somewhat
aware of what he had accomplished with the book that had
been begun as journey work and depreciated, postponed
threatened with destruction. It is his masterpiece, and perhaps he learned to know that. But he could scarcely have estimated it for what it is, one of the world's great books and
one of the central documents of American culture.
Wherein does its greatness lie? Primarily in its power oi
telling the truth. An awareness of this quality as it exists in
Tom Sawyer once led Mark Twain to say of the earlier work
that "it is not a boys' book at all. It will be read only by
adults. It is written only for adults." But this was only a manner of speaking, Mark Twain's way of asserting, with a discernible touch of irritation, the degree of truth he had
achieved. It does not represent his usual view either of boys
books or of boys. No one, as he well knew, sets a higher value
on truth than a boy. Truth is the whole of a boy's conscious
demand upon the world of adults. He is likely to believe thai
the adult world is in a conspiracy to lie to him, and it is this
belief, by no means unfounded, that arouses Tom and Huck
and all boys to their moral sensitivity, their everlasting concern with justice, which they call fairness. At the same time it
often makes them skillful and profound liars in their own
defense, yet they do not tell the ultimate lie of adults: the)
do not lie to themselves. That is why Mark Twain felt that il
io6 The Liberal Imagination
was impossible to carry Tom Sawyer beyond boyhood in
maturity "he would lie just like all the other one-horse men
of literature and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt
for him.'*
Certainly one element in the greatness o Huckleberry
Finn, as also in the lesser greatness of Tom Sawyer, is that it
succeeds first as a boys' book. One can read it at ten and then
annually ever after, and each year find that it is as fresh as
the year before, that it has changed only in becoming somewhat larger. To read it young is like planting a tree young
each year adds a new growth ring of meaning, and the book
is as little likely as the tree to become dull. So, we may imagine, an Athenian boy grew up together with the Odyssey.
There are few other books which we can know so young and
love so long.
The truth of Huckleberry Finn is of a different kind from
that of Tom Sawyer. It is a more intense truth, fiercer and
more complex. Tom Sawyer has the truth of honesty what
it says about things and feelings is never false and always
both adequate and beautiful. Huckleberry Finn has this kind
of truth, too, but it has also the truth of moral passion; it deals
directly with the virtue and depravity of man's heart.
Perhaps the best clue to the greatness of Huckleberry Finn
has been given to us by a writer who is as different from Mark
Twain as it is possible for one Missourian to be from another.
T. S. Eliot's poem, "The Dry Salvages," the third of his Four
Quartets, begins with a meditation on the Mississippi, which
Mr. Eliot knew in his St. Louis boyhood:
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god . . .
And the meditation goes on to speak of the god as
almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder of
Huckleberry Finn 107
What men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropi dated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and
waiting. 1
Huckleberry Finn is a great book because It is about a god
about, that is, a power which seems to have a mind and
will of its own, and which to men of moral imagination appears to embody a great moral idea.
Huck himself is the servant of the river-god, and he comes
very close to being aware of the divine nature of the being
he serves. The world he inhabits is perfectly equipped to
accommodate a deity, for it is full of presences and meanings
which it conveys by natural signs and also by preternatural
omens and taboos: to look at the moon over the left shoulder,.
to shake the tablecloth after sundown, to handle a snakeskin, are ways of offending the obscure and prevalent spirits
Huck is at odds, on moral and aesthetic grounds, with the
only form of established religion he knows, and his very intense moral life may be said to derive almost wholly from his
love of the riven He lives in a perpetual adoration of the
Mississippi's power and charm. Huck, of course, always expresses himself better than he can know, but nothing draws
upon his gift of speech like his response to his deity. After
every sally into the social life of the shore, he returns to the
river with relief and thanksgiving; and at each return, regular and explicit as a chorus in a Greek tragedy, there is a
hymn of praise to the god's beauty, mystery, and strength, and
to his noble grandeur in contrast with the pettiness of men.
Generally the god is benign, a being of long sunny days and
spacious nights. But, like any god, he is also dangerous and
deceptive. He generates fogs which bewilder, and contrives
echoes and false distances which confuse. His sand bars can
ground and his hidden snags can mortally wound a great
steamboat. He can cut away the solid earth from under a
i Copyright, 1943, by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt,
Brace
and Company.
io8 The Liberal Imagination
man's feet and take his house with it. The sense of the danger
of the river is what saves the book from any touch of the
sentimentality and moral ineptitude of most works which contrast the life of nature with the life of society.
The river itself is only divine; it is not ethical and good.
But its nature seems to foster the goodness of those who love
it and try to fit themselves to its ways. And we must observe
that we cannot make that Mark Twain does not make an
absolute opposition between the river and human society. To
Huck much of the charm of the river life is human: it is the
raft and the wigwam and Jim. He has not run away from
Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas and his brutal father to
a completely individualistic liberty, for in Jim he finds his
true father, very much as Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's
Ulysses finds his true father in Leopold Bloom. 2 The boy and
the Negro slave form a family, a primitive community and
it is a community of saints.
Huck's intense and even complex moral quality may possibly not appear on a first reading, for one may be caught
and convinced by his own estimate of himself, by his brags
about his lazy hedonism, his avowed preference for being
alone, his dislike of civilization. The fact is, of course, that
he is involved in civilization up to his ears. His escape from
society is but his way of reaching what society ideally dreams
of for itself. Responsibility is the very essence of his character, and it is perhaps to the point that the original of Huck,
a boyhood companion of Mark Twain's named Tom Blenkenship, did, like Huck, "light out for the Territory," only to
become a justice of the peace in Montana, "a good citizen and
greatly respected."
Huck does indeed have all the capacities for simple happi-
2 In Joyce's Finnegan's Wake both Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn appear frequently. The theme of rivers is, of course, dominant in the
book; and
Huck's name suits Joyce's purpose, for Finn is one of the many names of
his
hero. Mark Twain's love of and gift for the spoken language make
another
reason for Joyce's interest in him.
Huckleberry Finn 109
ness he says he has, but circumstances and his own moral nature make him the least carefree of boys he is always "in a
sweat" over the predicament of someone else. He has a great
sense of the sadness of human life, and although he likes to
be alone, the words "lonely'* and "loneliness" are frequent
with him. The note of his special sensibility is struck early in
the story: "Well, when Tom and me got to the edge of the
hilltop we looked away down into the village and could see
three or four lights twinkling where there were sick folks,
maybe; and the stars over us was sparkling ever so fine; and
down by the village was the river, a whole mile broad, and
awful still and grand." The identification of the lights as the
lamps of sick-watches defines Huck's character.
His sympathy is quick and immediate. When the circus
audience laughs at the supposedly drunken man who tries to
ride the horse, Huck is only miserable: "It wasn't funny to
me . . . ; I was all of a tremble to see his danger/' When he
imprisons the intending murderers on the wrecked steam-
boat, his first thought is of how to get someone to rescue them,
for he considers "how dreadful it was, even for murderers, to
be in such a fix. I says to myself, there ain't no telling but I
might come to be a murderer myself yet, and then how would
I like it." But his sympathy is never sentimental. When at
last he knows that the murderers are beyond help, he has no
inclination to false pathos. "I felt a little bit heavy-hearted
about the gang, but not much, for I reckoned that if they
could stand it I could." His will is genuinely good and he has
no need to torture himself with guilty second thoughts.
Not the least remarkable thing about Huck's feeling for
people is that his tenderness goes along with the assumption
that his fellow men are likely to be dangerous and wicked.
He travels incognito, never telling the truth about himself
and never twice telling the same lie, for he trusts no one and
the" lie comforts him even when it is not necessary. He instinctively knows that the best way to keep a party of men
no The Liberal Imagination
away from Jim on the raft is to beg them to come aboard to
help his family stricken with smallpox. And if he had not already had the knowledge of human weakness and stupidity
and cowardice, he would soon have acquired it, for all his encounters forcibly teach it to him the insensate feud of the
Graingerfords and Shepherdsons, the invasion of the raft by
the Duke and the King, the murder of Boggs, the lynching
party, and the speech of Colonel Sherburn. Yet his profound
and bitter knowledge of human depravity never prevents him
from being a friend to man.
No personal pride interferes with his well-doing. He knows
what status is and on the whole he respects it he is really a
very respectable person and inclines to like "quality folks"
but he himself is unaffected by it. He himself has never had
status, he has always been the lowest of the low, and the considerable fortune he had acquired in The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer is never real to him. When the Duke suggests that
Huck and Jim render him the personal service that accords
with his rank, Huck's only comment is, "Well, that was easy
so we done it.'* He is injured in every possible way by the
Duke and the King, used and exploited and manipulated,
yet when he hears that they are in danger from a mob, his
natural impulse is to warn them. And when he fails of his
purpose and the two men are tarred and feathered and ridden on a rail, his only thought is, "Well, it made me sick to
see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed
like I couldn't ever feel any hardness against them any more
in the world."
And if Huck and Jim on the raft do indeed make a community of saints, it is because they do not have an ounce of
pride between them. Yet this is not perfectly true, for the one
disagreement they ever have is over a matter of pride. It is
on the occasion when Jim and Huck have been separated by
the fog. Jim has mourned Huck as dead, and then, exhausted,
has fallen asleep. When he awakes and finds that Huck has
Huckleberry Finn 111
returned, he is overjoyed; but Huck convinces him that he
has only dreamed the incident, that there has been no fog, no
separation, no chase, no reunion, and then allows him to
make an elaborate ''interpretation" of the dream he now believes he has had. Then the joke is sprung, and in the growing light of the dawn Huck points to the debris of leaves on
the raft and the broken oar.
Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the
trash again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that
he couldn't seem to shake it loose and get the facts back into its
place again right away. But when he did get the thing straightened
around he looked at me steady without ever smiling, and says:
"What do dey stan' for? I'se gwyne to tell you. When I got all
wore out wid work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my
heart wuz mos' broke bekase you wuz los', en I didn* k'yer no mo*
what became er me en de raf . En when I wake up en fine you back
agin, all safe en soun', de tears come, en I could a got down on my
knees en kiss yo' foot, I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout
wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck
dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er
dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed/'
Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in
there without saying anything but that.
The pride of human affection has been touched, one of the
few prides that has any true dignity. And at its utterance*
Huck's one last dim vestige of pride of status, his sense of
his position as a white man, wholly vanishes: "It was fifteen
minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn't sorry for it afterwards either."
This incident is the beginning of the moral testing and development which a character so morally sensitive as Huck's
must inevitably undergo. And it becomes an heroic character
when, on the urging of affection, Huck discards the moral
code he has always taken for granted and resolves to help Jim
H2 The Liberal Imagination
in his escape from slavery. The intensity of his struggle over
the act suggests how deeply he is involved in the society which
he rejects. The satiric brilliance of the episode lies, of course,
in Huck's solving his problem not by doing "right" but by
doing "wrong." He has only to consult his conscience, the
conscience of a Southern boy in the middle of the last century,
to know that he ought to return Jim to slavery. And as soon
as he makes the decision according to conscience and decides to inform on Jim, he has all the warmly gratifying emotions of conscious virtue. "Why, it was astonishing, the way
I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles
all gone. ... I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the
first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could
pray now." And when at last he finds that he cannot endure
his decision but must sacrifice the comforts of the pure heart
and help Jim in his escape, it is not because he has acquired
any new ideas about slavery he believes that he detests
Abolitionists; he himself answers when he is asked if the explosion of a steamboat boiler had hurt anyone, "No'm, killed
a nigger," and of course finds nothing wrong in the responsive
comment, "Well, it's lucky because sometimes people do get
hurt." Ideas and ideals can be of no help to him in his moral
crisis. He no more condemns slavery than Tristram and
Lancelot condemn marriage; he is as consciously wicked as
any illicit lover of romance and he consents to be damned for
a personal devotion, never questioning the justice of the punishment he has incurred.
Huckleberry Finn was once barred from certain libraries
and schools for its alleged subversion of morality. The au-
thorities had in mind the book's endemic lying, the petty
thefts, the denigrations of respectability and religion, the bad
language, and the bad grammar. We smile at that excessive
care, yet in point of fact Huckleberry Finn is indeed a subversive book no one who reads thoughtfully the dialectic
of Huck's great moral crisis will ever again be wholly able to
Huckleberry Finn 113
accept without some question and some irony the assumptions of the respectable morality by which he lives, nor will
ever again be certain that what he considers the clear dictates
of moral reason are not merely the engrained customary beliefs of his time and place.
We are not likely to miss in Huckleberry Finn the subtle,
implicit moral meaning of the great river. But we are likely
to understand these moral implications as having to do only
with personal and individual conduct. And since the sum of
individual pettiness is on the whole pretty constant, we are
likely to think of the book as applicable to mankind in general and at all times and in all places, and we praise it by calling it "universal." And so it is; but like many books to which
that large adjective applies, it is also local and particular. It
has a particular moral reference to the United States in the
period after the Civil War. It was then when, in Mr. Eliot's
phrase, the river was forgotten, and precisely by the "dwellers
in cities/' by the "worshippers of the machine."
The Civil War and the development of the railroads ended
the great days when the river was the central artery of the
nation. No contrast could be more moving than that between the hot, turbulent energy of the river life of the first
part of Life on the Mississippi and the melancholy reminiscence of the second part. And the war that brought the end
of the rich Mississippi days also marked a change in the
quality of life in America which, to many men, consisted of a
deterioration of American moral values. It is of course a hu-
man habit to look back on the past and to find it a better and
-more innocent time than the present. Yet in this instance
there seems to be an objective basis for the judgment. We cannot disregard the testimony of men so diverse as Henry
Adams, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Mark
Twain himself, to mention but a few of the many who were
in agreement on this point. All spoke of something that had
gone out of American life after the war, some simplicity, some
H4 The Liberal Imagination
innocence, some peace. None of them was under any illusion
about the amount of ordinary human wickedness that existed
in the old days, and Mark Twain certainly was not. The difference was in the public attitude, in the things that were now accepted and made respectable in the national ideal. It was,
they all felt, connected with new emotions about money. As
Mark Twain said, where formerly "the people had desired
money," now they "fall down and worship it." The new gospel was, "Get money. Get it quickly. Get it in abundance.
Get it in prodigious abundance. Get it dishonestly if you can,
honestly if you must." 3
With the end of the Civil War capitalism had established
itself. The relaxing influence of the frontier was coming to
an end. Americans increasingly became "dwellers in cities"
and "worshippers of the machine." Mark Twain himself became a notable part of this new dispensation. No one worshiped the machine more than he did, or thought he did he
ruined himself by his devotion to the Paige typesetting machine, by which he hoped to make a fortune even greater than
he had made by his writing, and he sang the praises of the machine age in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
He associated intimately with the dominant figures of American business enterprise. Yet at the same time he hated the new
way of life and kept bitter memoranda of his scorn, commenting on the low morality or the bad taste of the men who were
shaping the ideal and directing the destiny of the nation.
Mark Twain said of Tom Sawyer that it "is simply a hyrnn,.
put into prose form to give it a worldly air." He might have
said the same, and with even more reason, of Huckleberry
Finn, which is a hymn to an older America forever gone, an
America which had its great national faults, which was full
of violence and even of cruelty, but which still maintained
its sense of reality, for it was not yet enthralled by money, the
father of ultimate illusion and lies. Against the money-god
s Mark Twain in Eruption, edited by Bernard De Voto, p. 77.
Huckleberry Finn 115
stands the river-god, whose comments are silent sunlight,
space, uncrowded time, stillness, and danger. It was quickly
forgotten once its practical usefulness had passed, but, as Mr.
Eliot's poem says, "The river is within us. . . ."
In form and style Huckleberry Finn is an almost perfect
work. Only one mistake has ever been charged against it, that
it concludes with Tom Sawyer's elaborate, too elaborate,
game of Jim's escape. Certainly this episode is too long in
the original draft it was much longer and certainly it is a
falling off, as almost anything would have to be, from the
incidents of the river. Yet it has a certain formal aptness
like, say, that of the Turkish initiation which brings MoHere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme to its close. It is a rather
mechanical development of an idea, and yet some device is
needed to permit Huck to return to his anonymity, to give
up the role of hero, to fall into the background which he prefers, for he is modest in all things and could not well endure
the attention and glamour which attend a hero at a book's
end. For this purpose nothing could serve better than the
mind of Tom Sawyer with its literary furnishings, its conscious romantic desire for experience and the hero's part,
and its ingenious schematization of life to achieve that aim.
The form of the book is based on the simplest of all novelforms, the so-called picaresque novel, or novel of the road,
which strings its incidents on the line of the hero's travels.
But, as Pascal says, "rivers are roads that move/' and the movement of the road in its own mysterious life transmutes the
primitive simplicity of the form: the road itself is the greatest
character in this novel of the road, and the hero's departures
from the river and his returns to it compose a subtle and significant pattern. The linear simplicity of the picaresque novel
is further modified by the story's having a clear dramatic organization: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and a
mounting suspense of interest.
As for the style of the book, it is not less than definitive in
n6 The Liberal Imagination
American literature. The prose of Huckleberry Finn estab-
lished for written prose the virtues of American colloquial
speech. This has nothing to do with pronunciation* or grammar. It has something to do with ease and freedom in the use
of language. Most of all it has to do with the structure of the
sentence, which is simple, direct, and fluent, maintaining the
rhythm of the word-groups of speech and the intonations of
the speaking voice.
In the matter of language, American literature had a
special problem. The young nation was inclined to think
that the mark o the truly literary product was a grandiosity
and elegance not to be found in the common speech. It therefore encouraged a greater breach between its vernacular and
its literary language than, say, English literature of the same
period ever allowed. This accounts for the hollow ring one
now and then hears even in the work of our best writers in
the first half of the last century. English writers of equal stature would never have made the lapses into rhetorical excess
that are common in Cooper and Poe and that are to be found
even in Melville and Hawthorne.
Yet at the same time that the language of ambitious literature was high and thus always in danger of falseness, the
American reader was keenly interested in the actualities of
daily speech. No literature, indeed, was ever so taken up with
matters of speech as ours was. "Dialect/ 1 which attracted even
our serious writers, was the accepted common ground of our
popular humorous writing. Nothing in social life seemed so
remarkable as the different forms which speech could take
the brogue of the immigrant Irish or the mispronunciation
of the German, the "affectation" of the English, the reputed
precision of the Rostonian, the legendary twang of the Yankee
farmer, and the drawl of the Pike County man. Mark Twain,
of course, was in the tradition of humor that exploited this
interest, and no one could play with it nearly so well. Although today the carefully spelled-out dialects of nineteenth-
Huckleberry Finn 117
century American humor are likely to seem dull enough, the
subtle variations of speech in Huckleberry Finn, of which
Mark Twain was justly proud, are still part ot the liveliness
and flavor of the book.
Out of his knowledge of the actual speech of America Mark
Twain forged a classic prose. The adjective may seem a
strange one, yet it is apt. Forget the misspellings and the
faults of grammar, and the prose will be seen to move with
the greatest simplicity, directness, lucidity, and grace. These
qualities are by no means accidental. Mark Twain, who read
widely, was passionately interested in the problems of style;
the mark of the strictest literary sensibility is everywhere to
be found in the prose of Huckleberry Finn.
It is this prose that Ernest Hemingway had chiefly in mind
when he said that "all modern American literature comes
from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
Hemingway's own prose stems from it directly and con-
sciously; so does the prose of the two modern writers who
most influenced Hemingway's early style, Gertrude Stein and
Sherwood Anderson (although neither of them could maintain the robust purity of their model); so, too, does the best
of William Faulkner's prose, which, like Mark Twain's own,
reinforces the colloquial tradition with the literary tradition. Indeed, it may be said that almost every contemporary
American writer who deals conscientiously with the problems
and possibility of prose must feel, directly or indirectly, the
influence of Mark Twain. He is the master of the style that
escapes the fixity of the printed page, that sounds in our ears
with the immediacy of the heard voice, the very voice of unpretentious truth.
Kipling
Kipling belongs irrevocably to our past, and although the
renewed critical attention he has lately been given by Edmund Wilson and T. S. Eliot is friendlier and more interesting than any he has received for a long time, it is less likely
to make us revise our opinions than to revive our memories
of him. But these memories, when revived, will be strong, for
if Kipling belongs to our past, he belongs there very firmly,
fixed deep In childhood feeling. And especially for liberals
of a certain age he must always be an interesting figure, for
he had an effect upon us in that obscure and important part
of our minds where literary feeling and political attitude
meet, an effect so much the greater because it was so early experienced; and then for many of us our rejection of him was
our first literary-political decision.
My own relation with Kipling was intense and I believe
typical. It began, properly enough, with The Jungle Book*
This was my first independently chosen and avidly read book,
my first literary discovery, all the more wonderful because I
had come upon it In an adult "set/' one of the ten green vol-
umes of the Century Edition that used to be found in many
homes. (The "set" has become unfashionable and that is a
blow to the literary education of the young, who, once they
had been lured to an author, used to remain loyal to him until they had read him by the yard.) The satisfactions of The
Jungle Book were large and numerous. I suppose a boy's
vestigial animal totemism was pleased; there were the marvel-
us
Kipling 119
ous but credible abilities of Mowgli; there were the deadly
enmities and grandiose revenges, strangely and tragically real.
And it was a world peopled by wonderful parents, not only
Mother Wolf and Father Wolf, but also the fathers were far
more numerous than the mothers Bagheera the panther,
Baloo the bear, Hathi the elephant, and the dreadful but
decent Kaa the python, a whole council of strength and wisdom which was as benign as it was dangerous, and no doubt
much of the delight came from discovering the benignity of
this feral world. And then there was the fascination of the
Pack and its Law. It is not too much to say that a boy had thus
his first introduction to a generalized notion of society. It was
a notion charged with feeling the Law was mysterious, firm,
certain, noble, in every way admirable beyond any rule of
home or school.
Mixed up with this feeling about the Pack and the Law,
and perfectly expressing it, was the effect of Kipling's gnomic
language, both in prose and in verse, for you could not entirely skip the verse that turned up in the prose, and so you
were led to trust yourself to the Barrack Room Ballads at a
time when you would trust no other poetry. That gnomic
quality of Kipling's, that knowing allusiveness which later
came to seem merely vulgar, was, when first experienced, a
delightful thing. By understanding Kipling's ellipses and allusions, you partook of what was Kipling's own special de-
light, the joy of being "in." Max Beerbohm has satirized
Kipling's yearning to be admitted to any professional arcanum, his fawning admiration of the man in uniform, the man
with the know-how and the technical slang. It is the emotion of a boy he lusts for the exclusive circle, for the sect
with the password, and he profoundly admires the technical,
secret-laden adults who run the world, the overalled people,
majestic in their occupation, superb in their preoccupation,
the dour engineer and the thoughtful plumber. To this emotion, developed not much beyond a boy's, Kipling was ad-
120 The Liberal Imagination
dieted all his life, and eventually it made him silly and a
bore. But a boy reading Kipling was bound to find all this
sense of arcanum very pertinent; as, for example, it expressed
itself in Plain Tales from the Hills, it seemed the very essence of adult life. Kipling himself was not much more than
a boy when he wrote these remarkable stories remarkable
because, no matter how one judges them, one never forgets
the least of them and he saw the adult world as full of rites
of initiation, of closed doors and listeners behind them, councils, boudoir conferences, conspiracies, innuendoes, and special knowledge. It was very baffling, and certainly as an introduction to literature it went counter to all our present
educational theory, according to which a child should not
be baffled at all but should read only about what he knows
of from experience; but one worked it out by a sort of algebra,
one discovered the meaning of the unknowns through the
knowns, and just as one got without definition an adequate
knowledge of what a sais was, or a daA-bungalow, and what
the significance of pukka was, so one penetrated to what
went on between the Gadsbys and to why Mrs. Hauksbee was
supposed to be charming and Mrs. Reiver not. Kipling's superior cryptic tone was in effect an invitation to understand
all this it suggested first that the secret was being kept not
only from oneself but from everyone else and then it suggested that the secret was not so much being kept as re-
vealed, if one but guessed hard enough. And this elaborate
manner was an invitation to be "in" not only on life but
on literature; to follow its hints with a sense of success was to
become an initiate of literature, a Past Master, a snob of the
esoteric Mystery of the Word.
"Craft" and "craftily" were words that Kipling loved (no
doubt they were connected with his deep Masonic attachment), and when he used them he intended all their several
meanings at once shrewdness, a special technique, a special secret technique communicated by some master of it,
Kipling 121
and the bond that one user of the technique would naturally
have with another. This feeling about the Craft, the Mystery,
grew on Kipling and colored his politics and even his cosmological ideas quite for the worse, but to a boy it suggested the
virtue of disinterested professional commitment. If one ever
fell in love with the cult of art, it was not because one had
been proselytized by some intelligent Frenchman, but because one had absorbed Kipling's creedal utterances about the
virtues of craft and had read The Light that Failed literally
to pieces.
These things we must be sure to put into the balance when
we make up our account with Kipling these and a few more.
To a middle-class boy he gave a literary sanction for the admiration of the illiterate and shiftless parts of humanity. He
was the first to suggest what may be called the anthropological
view, the perception that another man's idea of virtue and
honor may be different from one's own but quite to be respected. We must remember this when we condemn his mindless imperialism. Indians naturally have no patience whatever with Kipling and they condemn even his best book, Kim,
saying that even here, where his devotion to the Indian life
is most fully expressed, he falsely represents the Indians. Perhaps this is so, yet the dominant emotions of Kim are love
and respect for the aspects of Indian life that the ethos of the
West does not usually regard even with leniency. Kim established the value of things a boy was not likely to find approved anywhere else the rank, greasy, over-rich things, the
life that was valuable outside the notions of orderliness, success, and gentility. It suggested not only a multitude of different ways of life, but even different modes of thought. Thus,
whatever one might come to feel personally about religion, a
reading of Kim could not fail to establish religion's factual
reality, not as a piety, which was the apparent extent of its existence in the West, but as something at the very root of life;
in Kim one saw the myth in the making before one's very
122 The Liberal Imagination
eyes and understood how and why it was made, and this, when
later one had the intellectual good luck to remember it, had
more to say about history and culture than anything in one's
mere experience. Kim, like The Jungle Book, is full of wonderful fathers, all dedicated men in their different ways, each
representing a different possibility of existence; and the
charm of each is the greater because the boy need not commit
himself to one alone but, like Kirn himself, may follow AH
into the shrewdness and sensuality of the bazaars, and be initiated by Colonel Strickland into the cold glamour of the Reason of State, and yet also make himself the son of the Lama,
the very priest of contemplation and peace.
And then a boy in a large New York high school could find
a blessed release from the school's offensive pieties about
"service" and "character" in the scornful individualism of
Stalky 6* Co. But it was with Stalky <fr Co. that the spell
was broken, and significantly enough by H. G. Wells. In his
Outline of History Wells connected the doings of Stalky, McTurk, and Beetle with British imperialism, and he characterized both in a way that made one see how much callousness,
arrogance, and brutality one had been willing to accept. From
then on the disenchantment grew. Exactly because Kipling
was so involved with one's boyhood, one was quick to give
him up in one's adolescence. The Wellsian liberalism took
hold, and Shaw offered a new romance of wit and intellect.
The new movements in literature came in to make Kipling
seem inconsequential and puerile, to require that he be dismissed as official and, as one used to say, intending something aesthetic and emotional rather than political, "bourgeois." He ceased to be the hero of life and literature and
became the villain, although even then a natural gratitude
kept green the memory of the pleasure he had given.
But the world has changed a great deal since the days when
that antagonism between Kipling and enlightenment was at
its early intensity, and many intellectual and political things
Kipling 123
have shifted from their old assigned places. The liberalism
of Wells and Shaw long ago lost its ascendency, and indeed
in its later developments it showed what could never in the
early days have been foreseen, an actual affinity with certain
elements of Kipling's own constellation of ideas. And now
when, in the essay which serves as the introduction to his
selection of Kipling's verse, Mr. Eliot speaks of "the fascination of exploring a mind so different from my own/' we surprise ourselves as perhaps Mr. Eliot intended that we
should by seeing that the similarities between the two minds
are no less striking than the differences. Time surely has
done its usual but always dramatic work of eroding our clear
notions of cultural antagonisms when Kipling can be thought
of as in any way akin to Eliot. Yet as Mr. Eliot speaks of
the public intention and the music-hall tradition of Kipling's verse, anyone who has heard a record of Mr. Eliot reading The Waste Land will be struck by how much that poem
is publicly intended, shaped less for the study than for the
platform or the pulpit, by how much the full dialect rendition of the cockney passages suggests that it was even shaped
for the music hall, by how explicit the poet's use of his voice
makes the music we are so likely to think of as internal and
secretive. Then it is significant that among the dominant
themes of both Kipling and Eliot are those of despair and the
fear of nameless psychological horror. Politically they share
an excessive reliance on administration and authority. They
have the same sense of being beset and betrayed by the ignoble
mob; Kipling invented and elaborated the image of the Pict,
the dark little hating man, "too little to love or to hate," who,
if left alone, "can drag down the state"; and this figure plays
its well-known part in Mr. Eliot's poetry, being for both poets
the stimulus to the pathos of xenophobia.
Mr. Eliot's literary apologia for Kipling consists of asking
us to judge him not as a deficient writer of poetry but as an
admirable writer of verse. Upon this there follow defini-
124 The Liberal Imagination
tions of a certain ingenuity, but the distinction between
poetry and verse does not really advance beyond the old inadequate one I believe that Mr. Eliot himself has specifically
rejected it which Matthew Arnold put forward in writing
about Dryden and Pope. I cannot see the usefulness of the
distinction; I can even see critical danger in it; and when Mr.
Eliot says that Kipling's verse sometimes becomes poetry, it
seems to me that verse, in Mr. Eliot's present sense, is merely
a word used to denote poetry of a particular kind, in which
certain intensities are rather low. Nowadays, it is true, we
are not enough aware of the pleasures of poetry of low intensity, by which, in our modern way, we are likely to mean
poetry in which the processes of thought are not, by means
of elliptical or tangential metaphor and an indirect syntax,
advertised as being under high pressure; Crabbe, Cowper,
and Scott are rejected because they are not Donne or Hopkins or Mr. Eliot himself, or even poets of far less consequence
than these; and no doubt Chaucer would be depreciated on
the same grounds, if we were at all aware of him these days.
I should have welcomed Mr. Eliot's speaking out in a general
way in support of the admirable, and, as I think, necessary,
tradition of poetry of low intensity. But by making it different in kind from poetry of high intensity and by giving
it a particular name which can only be of invidious import,
he has cut us off still more sharply from its virtues.
Kipling, then, must be taken as a poet. Taken so, he will
scarcely rank very high, although much must be said in his
praise. In two evenings, or even in a single very long one, you
can read through the bulky Inclusive Edition of his verse, on
which Mr, Eliot's selection is based, and be neither wearied,
in part because you will not have been involved, nor uninterested, because Kipling was a man of great gifts. You will
have moments of admiration, sometimes of unwilling admiration, and even wish that Mr. Eliot had included certain poems
in his selection that he has left out. You will be frequently
Kipling 125
irritated by the truculence and sometimes amused by its unconsciousness who but Kipling would write a brag about
English understatement? Carlyle roaring the virtues of Silence
is nothing to it but when you have done you will be less
inclined to condemn than to pity: the constant iteration of
the bravado will have been illuminated by a few poems that
touch on the fear and horror which Mr. Wilson speaks of at
length and which Mr. Eliot refers to; you feel that the walls
of wrath and the ramparts of empire are being erected against
the mind's threat to itself. This is a real thing, whether we call
it good or bad, and its force of reality seems to grow rather
than diminish in memory, seems to be greater after one's actual reading is behind one; the quality of this reality is that
which we assign to primitive and elemental things, and, judge
it as we will, we dare not be indifferent or superior to it.
In speaking of Kipling's politics, Mr. Eliot contents himself with denying that Kipling was a fascist; a tory, he says,
is a very different thing, a tory considers fascism the last de-
basement of democracy. But this, I think, is not quite ingenuous of Mr. Eliot. A tory, to be sure, is not a fascist, and
Kipling is not properly to be called a fascist, but neither is
his political temperament to be adequately described merely
by reference to a tradition which is honored by Dr. Johnson,
Burke, and Walter Scott. Kipling is not like these men; he is
not generous, and, although he makes much to-do about manliness, he is not manly; and he has none of the mind of the few
great tories. His toryism often had in it a lower-middle-class
snarl of defeated gentility, and it is this, rather than his love
of authority and force, that might suggest an affinity with fascism. His imperialism is reprehensible not because it is imperialism but because it is a puny and mindless imperialism. In
short, Kipling is unloved and unlovable not by reason of his
beliefs but by reason of the temperament that gave them
literary expression.
I have said that the old antagonism between liberalism
126 The Liberal Imagination
and Kipling is now abated by time and events, yet it is still
worth saying, and it is not extravagant to say, that Kipling
was one of liberalism's major intellectual misfortunes. John
Stuart Mill, when he urged all liberals to study the conservative Coleridge, said that we should pray to have enemies who
make us worthy of ourselves. Kipling was an enemy who had
the opposite effect. He tempted liberals to be content with
easy victories of right feeling and with moral self-congratulation. For example, the strength of toryism at its best lies in
its descent from a solid administrative tradition, while the
weakness of liberalism, arising from its history of reliance
upon legislation, is likely to be a fogginess about administration (or, when the fog clears away a little, a fancy and absolute notion of administration such as Wells and Shaw gave
way to). Kipling's sympathy was always with the administrator and he is always suspicious of the legislator. This is foolish, but it is not the most reprehensible error in the world,
and it is a prejudice which, in the hands of an intelligent
man, say a man like Walter Bagehot or like Fitzjames Stephen, might make clear to the man of principled theory, to
the liberal, what the difficulties not merely of government
but of governing really are. And that is what Kipling set out
to do, but he so charged his demonstration with hatred and
contempt, with rancor and caste feeling, he so emptied the
honorable tory tradition of its intellectual content, that he
simply could not be listened to or believed, he could only be
reacted against. His extravagance sprang from his hatred of
the liberal intellectual he was, we must remember, the aggressor in the quarrel and the liberal intellectual responded
by hating everything that Kipling loved, even when it had
its element of virtue and enlightenment.
We must make no mistake about it Kipling was an honest
man and he loved the national virtues. But I suppose no man
ever did more harm to the national virtues than Kipling
did. He mixed them up with a swagger and swank, with bully-
Kipling 127
ing, ruthlessness, and self-righteousness, and he set them up
as necessarily antagonistic to intellect. He made them stink
in the nostrils o youth. I remember that in my own undergraduate days we used specifically to exclude physical courage
from among the virtues; we were exaggerating the point of
a joke of Shaw's and reacting from Kipling. And up to the
war I had a yearly struggle with undergraduates over Wordsworth's poem, "The Character of the Happy Warrior," which
is, I suppose, the respectable father of the profligate "If." * It
seemed too moral and "manly," the students said, and once
when I remarked that John Wordsworth had apparently
been just such a man as his brother had described,, and told
them about his dutiful and courageous death at sea, they said
flatly that they were not impressed. This was not what most
of them really thought, but the idea of courage and duty had
been steeped for them in the Kipling vat and they rejected
the idea with the color. In England this response seems to
have gone even further. 2 And when the war came, the interesting and touching phenomenon of the cult of Richard
Hillary, which Arthur Koestler has described, was the effort
of the English young men to find the national virtues without the Kipling color, to know and resist their enemies without self-glorification.
In our day the idea of the nation has become doubtful and
debilitated all over the world, or at least wherever it is not
being enforced by ruthless governments or wherever it is not
being nourished by immediate danger or the tyranny of other
nations. Men more and more think it best to postulate their
loyalty either to their class, or to the idea of a social organization more comprehensive than that of the nation, or to a
cultural ideal or a spiritual fatherland. Yet in the attack
which has been made on the national idea, there are, one
1 The war over, the struggle is on again.
2 George Orwell's essay on Kipling in Dickens, Dali and Others deals
bluntly
and fairly with the implications of easy "liberal" and "aesthetic"
contempt for
everything Kipling stood for.
The Liberal Imagination
suspects, certain motives that are not expressed, motives that
have less to do with reason and order than with the modern
impulse to say that politics is not really a proper human activity at all; the reluctance to give loyalty to any social organization which falls short of some ideal organization of
the future may imply a disgust not so much with the merely
national life as with civic life itself. And on the positive side
too something is still to be said for nations, the case against
them is not yet closed. Of course in literature nothing ever
is said; every avowal of national pride or love or faith rings
false and serves but to reinforce the tendency of rejection, as
the example of the response to Kipling shows. Yet Kipling
himself, on one occasion, dealt successfully with the national
theme and in doing so implied the reason for the general
failure the "Recessional" hymn is a remarkable and perhaps a great national poem; its import of humility and fear
at the moment of national success suggests that the idea of
the nation, although no doubt a limited one, is still profound enough to require that it be treated with a certain
measure of seriousness and truth-telling. But the occasion is
exceptional with Kipling, who by the utterances that are characteristic of him did more than any writer of our time to bring
the national idea into discredit.
The Immortality Ode
Criticism, we know, must always be concerned with the poem
itself. But a poem does not always exist only in itself: sometimes it has a very lively existence in its false or partial appearances. These simulacra of the actual poem must be taken into
account by criticism; and sometimes, in its effort to come at
the poem as it really is, criticism does well to allow the simulacra to dictate at least its opening moves. In speaking about
Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," I should like to begin by considering an interpretation of the poem which is commonly
made. 1 According to this interpretation I choose for its
brevity Dean Sperry's statement of a view which is held by
many other admirable critics the Ode is "Wordsworth's
conscious farewell to his art, a dirge sung over his departing
powers."
How did this interpretation erroneous, as I believe come
into being? The Ode may indeed be quoted to substantiate it,
but I do not think it has been drawn directly from the poem
itself. To be sure, the Ode is not wholly perspicuous. Wordsworth himself seems to have thought it difficult, for in the
Fenwick notes he speaks of the need for competence and attention in the reader. The difficulty does not lie in the diction,
which is simple, or even in the syntax, which is sometimes
obscure, but rather in certain contradictory statements which
i The text of the poem is given at the end of this essay.
129
i go The Liberal Imagination
the poem makes, and in the ambiguity of some of its crucial
words. Yet the erroneous interpretation I am dealing with does
not arise from any intrinsic difficulty of the poem itself but
rather from certain extraneous and unexpressed assumptions
which some of its readers make about the nature of the mind.
Nowadays it is not difficult for us to understand that such
tacit assumptions about the mental processes are likely to lie
hidden beneath what we say about poetry. Usually, despite our
general awareness of their existence, it requires great effort to
bring these assumptions explicitly into consciousness. But in
speaking of Wordsworth one of the commonest of our unexpressed ideas comes so close to the surface of our thought that
it needs only to be grasped and named. I refer to the belief
that poetry is made by means of a particular poetic faculty, a
faculty which may be isolated and defined.
It is this belief, based wholly upon assumption, which
underlies all the speculations of the critics who attempt to
provide us with explanations of Wordsworth's poetic decline
by attributing it to one or another of the events of his life. In
effect any such explanation is a way of defining Wordsworth's
poetic faculty: what the biographical critics are telling us is
that Wordsworth wrote great poetry by means of a faculty
which depended upon his relations with Annette Vallon, or
by means of a faculty which operated only so long as he admired the French Revolution, or by means of a faculty which
flourished by virtue of a particular pitch of youthful senseperception or by virtue of a certain attitude toward Jeffrey's criticism or by virtue of a certain relation with Coleridge.
Now no one can reasonably object to the idea of mental
determination in general, and I certainly do not intend to
make out that poetry is an unconditioned activity. Still, this
particular notion of mental determination which implies that
Wordsworth's genius failed when it was deprived of some
single emotional circumstance is so much too simple and so
The Immortality Ode 131
much too mechanical that I think we must inevitably reject it.
Certainly what we know of poetry does not allow us to refer
the making of it to any single faculty. Nothing less than the
whole mind, the whole man, will suffice for its origin. And
such was Wordsworth's own view of the matter.
There is another unsubstantiated assumption at work in
the common biographical interpretation of the Ode. This
is the belief that a natural and inevitable warfare exists between the poetic faculty and the faculty by which we conceive
or comprehend general ideas. Wordsworth himself did not believe in this antagonism indeed, he held an almost contrary
view but Coleridge thought that philosophy had encroached
upon and destroyed his own powers, and the critics who speculate on Wordsworth's artistic fate seem to prefer Coleridge's
psychology to Wordsworth's own. Observing in the Ode a
contrast drawn between something called "the visionary
gleam" and something called "the philosophic mind," they
leap to the conclusion that the Ode is Wordsworth's conscious
farewell to his art, a dirge sung over departing powers.
I am so far from agreeing with this conclusion that I believe
the Ode is not only not a dirge sung over departing powers but
actually a dedication to new powers. Wordsworth did not, to
be sure, realize his hopes for these new powers, but that is quite
another matter.
11
As with many poems, it is hard to understand any part of the
Ode until we first understand the whole of it. I will therefore
say at once what I think the poem is chiefly about. It is a poem
about growing; some say it is a poem about growing old, but
I believe it is about growing up. It is incidentally a poem about
optics and then, inevitably, about epistemology; it is concerned with ways of seeing and then with ways of knowing.
Ultimately it is concerned with ways of acting, for, as usual
The Liberal Imagination
with Wordsworth, knowledge implies liberty and power. In
only a limited sense is the Ode a poem about immortality.
Both formally and in the history of its composition the poem
is divided into two main parts. The first part, consisting of
four stanzas, states an optical phenomenon and asks a question
about it. The second part, consisting of seven stanzas, answers
that question and is itself divided into two parts, of which the
first is despairing, the second hopeful. Some time separates the
composition of the question from that of the answer; the evidence most recently adduced by Professor de Selincourt seems
to indicate that the interval was two years.
The question which the first part asks is this:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
All the first part leads to this question, but although it moves
in only one direction it takes its way through more than one
mood. There are at least three moods before the climax of the
question is reached.
The first stanza makes a relatively simple statement.
"There was a time" when all common things seemed clothed
in "celestial light," when they had "the glory and the freshness
of a dream/' In a poem ostensibly about immortality we ought
perhaps to pause over the word "celestial," but the present
elaborate title was not given to the poem until much later,
and conceivably at the time of the writing of the first part the
idea of immortality was not in Wordsworth's mind at all.
Celestial light probably means only something different from
ordinary, earthly, scientific light; it is a light of the mind, shining even in darkness "by night or day" and it is perhaps
similar to the light which is praised in the invocation to the
third book of Paradise Lost.
The second stanza goes on to develop this first mood, speaking of the ordinary, physical kind of vision and suggesting
further the meaning of "celestial." We must remark that in
The Immortality Ode 133
this stanza Wordsworth is so far from observing a diminution
of his physical senses that he explicitly affirms their strength.
He is at pains to tell us how vividly he sees the rainbow, the
rose, the moon, the stars, the water and the sunshine. I emphasize this because some of those who find the Ode a dirge over
the poetic power maintain that the poetic power failed with
the failure of Wordsworth's senses. It is true that Wordsworth,
who lived to be eighty, was said in middle life to look much
older than his years. Still, thirty-two, his age at the time of
writing the first part of the Ode, is an extravagantly early age
for a dramatic failure of the senses. We might observe here, as
others have observed elsewhere, that Wordsworth never did
have the special and perhaps modern sensibility of his sister
or of Coleridge, who were so aware of exquisite particularities.
His finest passages are moral, emotional, subjective; whatever
visual intensity they have comes from his response to the ob-
ject, not from his close observation of it.
And in the second stanza Wordsworth not only confirms his
senses but he also confirms his ability to perceive beauty. He
tells us how he responds to the loveliness of the rose and of the
stars reflected in the water. He can deal, in the way of Fancy,
with the delight of the moon when there are no competing
stars in the sky. He can see in Nature certain moral propensities. He speaks of the sunshine as a "glorious birth." But here
he pauses to draw distinctions from that fascinating word
* 'glory": despite his perception of the sunshine as a glorious
birth, he knows "That there hath past away a glory from the
earth."
Now, with the third stanza, the poem begins to complicate
itself. It is while Wordsworth is aware of the "optical" change
in himself, the loss of the "glory," that there comes to him "a
thought of grief." I emphasize the word "while" to suggest
that we must understand that for some time he had been conscious of the "optical" change without feeling grief. The grief*
then, would seem to be coincidental with but not necessarily
The Liberal Imagination
caused by the change. And the grief is not of long duration,
for we learn that
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.
It would be not only interesting but also useful to know what
that "timely utterance" was, and I shall hazard a guess; but
first I should like to follow the development of the Ode a little
further, pausing only to remark that the reference to the timely
utterance seems to imply that, although the grief is not of long
duration, still we are not dealing with the internal experiences
of a moment, or of a morning's walk, but of a time sufficient
to allow for development and change of mood; that is, the
dramatic time of the poem is not exactly equivalent to the
emotional time.
Stanza iv goes on to tell us that the poet, after gaining relief
from the timely utterance, whatever that was, felt himself quite
in harmony with the joy of Nature in spring. The tone of this
stanza is ecstatic, and in a way that some readers find strained
and unpleasant and even of doubtful sincerity. Twice there is
a halting repetition of words to express a kind of painful intensity of response: "I feel I feel it all," and "I hear, I hear,
with joy I hear!" Wordsworth sees, hears, feels and with that
"joy" which both he and Coleridge felt to be so necessary to
the poet. But despite the response, despite the joy, the ecstasy
changes to sadness in a wonderful modulation which quite
justifies the antecedent shrillness of affirmation:
But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat.
And what they utter is the terrible question:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
The Immortality Ode 135
111
Now, the Interpretation which makes the Ode a dirge over
departing powers and a conscious farewell to art takes it for
granted that the visionary gleam, the glory, and the dream,
are Wordsworth's names for the power by which he made
poetry. This interpretation gives to the Ode a place in Wordsworth's life exactly analogous to the place that "Dejection:
An Ode" has in Coleridge's life. It is well known how intimately the two poems are connected; the circumstances of their
composition makes them symbiotic- Coleridge in his poem
most certainly does say that his poetic powers are gone or going; he is very explicit, and the language he uses is very close
to Wordsworth's own. He tells us that upon "the inanimate
cold world" there must issue from the soul "a light, a glory, a
fair luminous cloud," and that this glory is Joy, which he himself no longer possesses. But Coleridge's poem, although it
responds to the first part of Wordsworth's, is not a recapitulation of it. On the contrary, Coleridge is precisely contrasting
his situation with Wordsworth's. As Professor de Selincourt
says in his comments on the first version of "Dejection," this
contrast "was the root idea" of Coleridge's ode. 2 In April of
1802 Wordsworth was a month away from his marriage to
Mary Hutchison, on the point of establishing his life in a
felicity and order which became his genius, while Coleridge
was at the nadir of despair over his own unhappy marriage and
his hopeless love for Sara, the sister of Wordsworth's fiancee.
And the difference between the situations of the two friends
stands in Coleridge's mind for the difference in the states of
health of their respective poetic powers.
Coleridge explicitly ascribes the decay of his poetic power
to his unhappinesS, which worked him harm in two ways by
forcing him to escape from the life of emotion to find refuge
2 Wordsworthian and Other Studies, Oxford, 1947.
The Liberal Imagination
n intellectual abstraction and by destroying the Joy which,
issuing as "a light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud," so irradiated
the world as to make it a fit object of the shaping power of
imagination. But Wordsworth tells us something quite different about himself. He tells us that he has strength, that he has
Joy, but still he has not the glory. In short, we have no reason
to assume that, when he asks the question at the end o the
fourth stanza, he means, "Where has my creative power gone?"
Wordsworth tells us how he made poetry; he says he made it
out of the experience of his senses as worked upon by his contemplative intellect, but he nowhere tells us that he made
poetry out of visionary gleams, out of glories, or out of dreams.
To be sure, he writes very often about gleams. The word
"gleam" is a favorite one with him, and a glance at the Lane
Cooper concordance will confirm our impression that Wordsworth, whenever he has a moment of insight or happiness, talks
about it in the language of light. His great poems are about
moments of enlightenment, in which the metaphoric and the
literal meaning of the word are at one he uses "glory" in the
abstract modern sense, but always with an awareness of the old
concrete iconographic sense of a visible nimbus. 3 But this momentary and special light is the subject matter of his poetry,
not the power of making it. The moments are moments o
understanding, but Wordsworth does not say that they make
writing poetry any easier. Indeed, in lines 59-131 of the first
book of The Prelude he expressly says that the moments of
clarity are by no means always matched by poetic creativity.
As for dreams and poetry, there is some doubt about the
meaning that Wordsworth gave to the word "dream" used as
a metaphor. In "Expostulation and Reply*' he seems to say
that dreaming "dream my time away" is a good thing, but
s We recall that in The Varieties of Religious Experience William James
speaks of the "hallucinatory or pseudo-hallucinatory luminous
phenomena,
pkotisms, to use the term of the psychologists/' the "floods of light and
glory,"
which characterize so many moments of revelation. James mentions
one person
who, experiencing the light, was uncertain of its externality.
The Immortality Ode 137
he is ironically using his interlocutor's depreciatory word, and
he really does not mean "dream" at all. In the Peele Castle
verses, which have so close a connection with the Immortality
Ode, he speaks of the "poet's dream" and makes it synonymous
with "gleam," with "the light that never was, on sea or land,"
and with the "consecration." But the beauty of the famous
lines often makes us forget to connect them with what follows,
for Wordsworth says that gleam, light, consecration, and
dream would have made an "illusion," or, in the 1807 version,
a "delusion." Professor Beatty reminds us that in the 1820
version Wordsworth destroyed the beauty of the lines in order
to make his intention quite clear. He wrote:
and add a gleam
Of lustre known to neither sea nor land,
But borrowed from the youthful Poet's Dream.
That is, according to the terms of Wordsworth's conception o
the three ages of man, the youthful Poet was, as he had a right
to be, in the service of Fancy and therefore saw the sea as calm.
But Wordsworth himself can now no longer see in the way of
Fancy; he has, he says, "submitted to a new control/' This
seems to be at once a loss and a gain. The loss: "A power is
gone, which nothing can restore." The gain: "A deep distress
hath humanized my Soul"; this is gain because happiness without "humanization" "is to be pitied, for 'tis surely blind"; to
be "housed in a dream" is to be "at distance from the kind"
(i.e., mankind). In the "Letter to Mathetes" he speaks of the
Fancy as "dreaming"; and the Fancy is, we know, a lower form
of intellect in Wordsworth's hierarchy, and peculiar to youth.
But although, as we see, Wordsworth uses the word "dream"
to mean illusion, we must remember that he thought illusions
might be very useful. They often led him to proper attitudes
and allowed him to deal successfully with reality. In The
Prelude he tells us how his reading of fiction made him able to
look at the disfigured face of the drowned man without too
138 The Liberal Imagination
much horror; how a kind of superstitious conviction of his
own powers was useful to him; how, indeed, many of the most
critical moments of his boyhood education were moments of
significant illusion; and in The Excursion he is quite explicit
about the salutary effects of superstition. But he was interested
in dreams not for their own sake but for the sake of reality.
Dreams may perhaps be associated with poetry, but reality
certainly is; and reality for Wordsworth comes fullest with
Imagination, the faculty of maturity. The loss of the "dream"
may be painful, but it does not necessarily mean the end of
poetry.
iv
And now for a moment I should like to turn back to the
"timely utterance/' because I think an understanding of it
will help get rid of the idea that Wordsworth was saying farewell to poetry. Professor Garrod believes that this "utterance"
was "My heart leaps up when I behold," which was written the
day before the Ode was begun. Certainly this poem is most intimately related to the Ode its theme, the legacy left by the
child to the man, is a dominant theme of the Ode, and Wordsworth used its last lines as the Ode's epigraph. But I should
like to suggest that the "utterance" was something else. In line
43 Wordsworth says, "Oh evil day! if I were sullen/' and the
word "sullen" leaps out at us as a striking and carefully chosen
word. Now there is one poem in which Wordsworth says that
he was sullen; it is "Resolution and Independence."
We know that Wordsworth was working on the first part of
the Ode on the 27th of March, the day after the composition
of the rainbow poem. On the i7th of June he added a little to
the Ode, but what he added we do not know. Between these
two dates Wordsworth and Dorothy had paid their visit to
Coleridge, who was sojourning at Keswick; during this visit
Coleridge, on April 4, had written "Dejection: an Ode," very
probably after he had read what was already in existence of
The Immortality Ode 139
the Immortality Ode. Coleridge's mental state was very bad
still, not so bad as to keep him from writing a great poem
and the Wordsworths were much distressed. A month later, on
May 3, Wordsworth began to compose "The Leech-Gatherer/'
later known as "Resolution and Independence/* It is this
poem that is, I think, the timely utterance. 4
"Resolution and Independence*' is a poem about the fate of
poets. It is also a poem about sullenness, in the sense that the
people in the Fifth Circle are said by Dante to be sullen:
" 'Sullen were we in the sweet air, that is gladdened by the sun,
carrying lazy smoke within our hearts; now lie sullen here in
the black mire! 7 This hymn they gurgle in their throats, for
they cannot speak it in full words" 5 that is, they cannot now
have relief by timely utterance, as they would not on earth.
And "sullenness" I take to be the creation of difficulties where
none exist, the working of a self-injuring imagination such as
a modern mental physician would be quick to recognize as a
neurotic symptom. Wordsworth's poem is about a sudden unmotivated anxiety after a mood of great exaltation. He speaks
of this reversal of feeling as something experienced by himself
before and known to all. In this mood he is the prey of "fears
and fancies," of "dim sadness" and "blind thoughts." These
feelings have reference to two imagined catastrophes. One of
them natural enough in a man under the stress of approaching marriage, for Wordsworth was to be married in October
is economic destitution. He reproaches himself for his past
indifference to the means of getting a living and thinks of what
41 follow Professor Garrod in assuming that the "utterance" was a
poem,
but of course it may have been a letter or a spoken word. And if indeed
the
"utterance" does refer to "Resolution and Independence," it may not
refer to
the poem itself as Jacques Barzun has suggested to me, it may refer to
what
the Leech-gatherer in the poem says to the poet, for certainly it is what
the
old man "utters" that gives the poet "relief."
s The Carlyle-Wicksteed translation. Dante's word is "tristi"; in
"Resolution
and Independence" Wordsworth speaks of "dim sadness." I mention
Dante's
sinners simply to elucidate the emotion that Wordsworth speaks of, not
to
suggest an influence.
The Liberal Imagination
may follow from this carefree life: "solitude, pain of heart,
distress, and poverty." His black thoughts are led to the fate of
poets "in their misery dead," among them Chatterton and
Burns. The second specific fear is of mental distress:
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
Coleridge, we must suppose, was in his thoughts after the depressing Keswick meeting, but he is of course thinking chiefly
of himself. It will be remembered how the poem ends, how
with some difficulty of utterance the poet brings himself to
speak with an incredibly old leech-gatherer, and, taking heart
from the man's resolution and independence, becomes again
"strong."
This great poem is not to be given a crucial meaning in
Wordsworth's life. It makes use of a mood to which everyone,
certainly every creative person, is now and again a victim. It
seems to me more likely that it, rather than the rainbow poem,
is the timely utterance of which the Ode speaks because in it,
and not in the rainbow poem, a sullen feeling occurs and is
relieved. But whether or not it is actually the timely utterance,
it is an autobiographical and deeply felt poem written at the
time the Ode was being written and seeming to have an emotional connection with the first part of the Ode. (The meeting
with the old man had taken place two years earlier and it is
of some significance that it should have come to mind as the
subject of a poem at just this time.) It is a very precise and
hard-headed account of a mood of great fear and it deals in a
very explicit way with the dangers that beset the poetic life.
But although Wordsworth urges himself on to think of all the
bad things that can possibly happen to a poet, and mentions solitude, pain of heart, distress and poverty, cold, pain and labor,,
all fleshly ills, and then even madness, he never says that a poet
stands in danger of losing his talent. It seems reasonable to
suppose that if Wordsworth were actually saying farewell to
The Immortality Ode 141
his talent in the Ode, there would be some hint of an endangered or vanishing talent in "Resolution and Independence."
But there is none; at the end of the poem Wordsworth is resolute in poetry.
Must we not, then, look with considerable skepticism at such
interpretations of the Ode as suppose without question that
the "gleam/ 7 the "glory," and the "dream" constitute the
power of making poetry? especially when we remember that
at a time still three years distant Wordsworth in The Prelude
will speak of himself as becoming a "creative soul" (book xn,
line 207; the italics are Wordsworth's own) despite the fact
that, as he says (book xii, line 281), he "sees by glimpses now."
The second half of the Ode is divided into two large movements, each of which gives an answer to the question with
which the first part ends. The two answers seem to contradict
each other. The first issues in despair, the second in hope; the
first uses a language strikingly supernatural, the second is entirely naturalistic. The two parts even differ in the statement
of fact, for the first says that the gleam is gone, whereas the
second says that it is not gone, but only transmuted. It is necessary to understand this contradiction, but it is not necessary
to resolve it, for from the circuit between its two poles comes
much of the power of the poem.
The first of the two answers (stanzas v-vm) tells us where
the visionary gleam has gone by telling us where it came from.
It is a remnant of a pre-existence in which we enjoyed a way
of seeing and knowing now almost wholly gone from us. We
come into the world, not with minds that are merely tabulae
rasae, but with a kind of attendant light, the vestige of an
existence otherwise obliterated from our memories. In infancy
and childhood the recollection is relatively strong, but it fades
as we move forward into earthly life. Maturity, with its habits
142 The Liberal Imagination
and its cares and its increase of distance from our celestial
origin, wears away the light of recollection. Nothing could be
more poignantly sad than the conclusion of this part with the
heavy sonority of its last line as Wordsworth addresses the
child in whom the glory still lives:
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
Between this movement of despair and the following movement of hope there is no clear connection save that of contradiction. But between the question itself and the movement of
hope there is an explicit verbal link, for the question is:
"Whither has fled the visionary gleam?" and the movement of
hope answers that "nature yet remembers/ What was so fugitive"
The second movement of the second part of the Ode tells us
again what has happened to the visionary gleam: it has not
wholly fled, for it is remembered. This possession of childhood
has been passed on as a legacy to the child's heir, the adult
man; for the mind, as the rainbow epigraph also says, is one
and continuous, and what was so intense a light in childhood
becomes "the fountain-light of all our day*' and a "masterlight of all our seeing/' that is, of our adult day and our mature
seeing. The child's recollection of his heavenly home exists
in the recollection of the adult.
But what exactly is this fountain-light, this master-light? I
am sure that when we understand what it is we shall see that
the glory that Wordsworth means is very different from Coleridge's glory, which is Joy. Wordsworth says that what he holds
in memory as the guiding heritage of childhood is exactly not
the Joy of childhood. It is not "delight," not "liberty," not
even "hope" not for these, he says, "I raise/The song of
thanks and praise." For what then does he raise the song? For
this particular experience of childhood:
The Immortality Ode 143
. . . those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised.
He mentions other reasons for gratitude, but here for the moment I should like to halt the enumeration.
We are told, then, that light and glory consist, at least In
part, of "questionings," "fallings from us," "vanishings," and
"blank misgivings" in a world not yet made real, for surely
Wordsworth uses the word "realised" in its most literal sense.
In his note on the poem he has this to say of the experience he
refers to:
... I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something
not apart from, but inherent in, my own material nature. Many
times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall
myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality. At this time I was
afraid of such processes.
He remarks that the experience is not peculiar to himself,
which is of course true, and he says that it was connected in
his thoughts with a potency of spirit which made him believe
that he could never die.
The precise and naturalistic way in which Wordsworth talks
of this experience of his childhood must cast doubt on Professor Garrod's statement that Wordsworth believed quite
literally in the notion of pre-existence, with which the "vanishings" experience is connected. Wordsworth is very careful
to delimit the extent of his belief; he says that it is "too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith" as an evidence of
immortality. He says that he is using the idea to illuminate
another idea using it, as he says, "for my purpose" and "as a
poet." It has as much validity for him as any "popular" religious idea might have, that is to say, a kind of suggestive
validity. We may regard pre-existence as being for Wordsworth
144 The Liberal Imagination
a very serious conceit, vested with relative belief, intended to
give a high value to the natural experience of the "vanishings." 6
The naturalistic tone of Wordsworth's note suggests that we
shall be doing no violence to the experience of the 'Vanishings" if we consider it scientifically. In a well-known essay,
"Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality," the distinguished psychoanalyst Ferenczi speaks of the child's reluctance to distinguish between himself and the world and of the
slow growth of objectivity which differentiates the self from
external things. And Freud himself, dealing with the "oceanic"
sensation of "being at one with the universe," which a literary
friend had supposed to be the source of all religious emotions,
conjectures that it is a vestige of the infant's st'ate of feeling
before he has learned to distinguish between the stimuli of his
own sensations and those of the world outside. In Civilization
and Its Discontents he writes:
Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself
the outside world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus
only a shrunken vestige of a more extensive feeling a feeling
which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world. If we may suppose that
this primary ego-feeling has been preserved in the minds of many
people to a greater or lesser extent it would co-exist like a sort
of counterpart with the narrower and more sharply outlined egofeeling of maturity, and the ideational content belonging to it
would be precisely the notion of limitless extension and oneness
with the universe the same feeling as that described by my friend
as "oceanic."
This has its clear relation to Wordsworth's "worlds not realised." Wordsworth, like Freud, was preoccupied by the idea of
reality, and, again like Freud, he knew that the child's way of
e In his Studies in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan, a Cambridge University
dissertation, Andrew Chiappe makes a similar judgment of the quality
and:
degree of belief in the idea of pre-existence in the poetry of Vaughan
and!
Traherne.
The Immortality Ode 145
apprehension was but a stage which, in the course of nature,
would give way to another. If we understand that Wordsworth
is speaking of a period common to the development of every-
one, we are helped to see that we cannot identify the vision of
that period with his peculiar poetic power.
But in addition to the experience of the "vanishings" there
is another experience for which Wordsworth is grateful to his
childhood and which, I believe, goes with the "vanishings" to
make up the "master-light," the "fountain-light." I am not
referring to the
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised,
but rather to what Wordsworth calls "those first affections."
I am inclined to think that with this phrase \Vordsworth
refers to a later stage in the child's development which, like
the earlier stage in which the external world is included within
the ego, leaves vestiges in the developing mind. This is the
period described in a well-known passage in Book n of The
Prelude, in which the child learns about the world in his
mother's arms:
Blest the infant Babe,
(For with my best conjecture I would trace
Our Being's earthly progress), blest the Babe,
Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep,
Rocked on his Mother's breast; who with his soul
Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye!
For him, in one dear Presence, there exists
A virtue which irradiates and exalts
Objects through widest intercourse of sense.
No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:
Along his infant veins are interfused
The gravitation and the filial bond
Of nature that connect him with the world.
Is there a flower, to which he points with hand
Too weak to gather it, already love
146 The Liberal Imagination
Drawn from love's purest earthly fount for him
Hath beautified that flower; already shades
Of pity cast from inward tenderness
Do fall around him upon aught that bears
Unsightly marks of violence or harm.
Emphatically such a Being lives,
Frail creature as he is, helpless as frail,
An inmate of this active universe:
For feeling has to him imparted power
That through the growing faculties of sense,
Doth like an agent of the one great Mind
Create, creator and receiver both,
Working but in alliance with the works
Which it beholds. Such, verily, is the first
Poetic 7 spirit of our human life,
By uniform control of after years,
In most, abated or suppressed; in some,
Through every change of growth and of decay
Pre-eminent till death.
The child, this passage says, does not perceive things merely
as objects; he first sees them, because maternal love is a condition of his perception, as objects-and-judgments, as valued
objects. He does not learn about a flower, but about the prettyflower, the flower that-I-want-and-that-mother-will-get-for-me;
he does not learn about the bird and a broken wing but about
the poor-bird-whose-wing-was-broken. The safety, warmth,
and good feeling of his mother's conscious benevolence is a
circumstance of his first learning. He sees, in short, with
"glory"; not only is he himself not in "utter nakedness" as the
Ode puts it, but the objects he sees are not in utter nakedness.
The passage from The Prelude says in naturalistic language
what stanza v of the Ode expresses by a theistical metaphor.
Both the Prelude passage and the Ode distinguish a state of
7 The use here of the word "poetic" is either metaphorical and general,
or
it is entirely literal, that is, it refers to the root-meaning of the word,
which is
"to make" Wordsworth has in mind the creative nature of right human
per-
ception and not merely poetry.
The Immortality Ode 147
exile from a state of security and comfort, of at-homeness;
there is (as the Prelude passage puts it) a "filial bond/' or (as
in stanza x of the Ode) a ''primal sympathy/' which keeps man
from being an "outcast . . . bewildered and depressed."
The Ode and The Prelude differ about the source of this
primal sympathy or filial bond. The Ode makes heavenly preexistence the source, The Prelude finds the source in maternal
affection. But the psychologists tell us that notions of heavenly
pre-existence figure commonly as representations of physical
prenatality the womb is the environment which is perfectly
adapted to its inmate and compared to it all other conditions
of life may well seem like "exile" to the (very literal) "outcast." 8 Even the security of the mother's arms, although it is
an effort to re-create for the child the old environment, is but
a diminished comfort. And if we think of the experience of
which Wordsworth is speaking, the "vanishings," as the child's
recollection of a condition in which it was very nearly true
that he and his environment were one, it will not seem surprising that Wordsworth should compound the two experiences and figure them in the single metaphor of the glorious
heavenly pre-existence. 9
I have tried to be as naturalistic as possible in speaking of
Wordsworth's childhood experiences and the more-or-less
Platonic notion they suggested to him. I believe that naturalism is in order here, for what we must now see is that Words-
s "Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever
in
that one case done commodiously done was." James Joyce, Ulysses.
The myth
of Eden is also interpreted as figuring either childhood or the womb see
below
Wordsworth's statement of the connection of the notion of preexistence with
Adam's fall.
9 Readers of Ferenczi's remarkable study, Thalassa, a discussion,
admittedly
speculative but wonderfully fascinating, of unconscious racial memories
of the
ocean as the ultimate source of life, will not be able to resist giving an
added
meaning to Wordsworth's lines about the "immortal sea/ Which
brought us
hither" and of the unborn children who "Sport upon the shore." The
recollection of Samuel Butler's delightful fantasy of the Unborn and his theory
of
unconscious memory will also serve to enrich our reading of the Ode by
suggesting the continuing force of the Platonic myth.
148 The Liberal Imagination
worth is talking about something common to us all, the
development of the sense o reality. To have once had the
visionary gleam of the perfect union of the self and the universe is essential to and definitive of our human nature, and it
is in that sense connected with the making of poetry. But the
visionary gleam is not in itself the poetry-making power, and
its diminution is right and inevitable.
That there should be ambivalence in Wordsworth's response
to this diminution is quite natural, and the two answers, that
of stanzas v-viu and that of stanzas ix-xi, comprise both the
resistance to and the acceptance of growth. Inevitably we resist change and turn back with passionate nostalgia to the
stage we are leaving. Still, we fulfill ourselves by choosing what
is painful and difficult and necessary, and we develop by moving toward death. In short, organic development is a hard paradox which Wordsworth is stating in the discrepant answers of
the second part of the Ode. And it seems to me that those
critics who made the Ode refer to some particular and unique
experience of Wordsworth's and who make it relate only to
poetical powers have forgotten their own lives and in consequence conceive the Ode to be a lesser thing than it really is,
for it is not about poetry, it is about life. And having made
this error, they are inevitably led to misinterpret the meaning
of the "philosophic mind" and also to deny that Wordsworth's
ambivalence is sincere. No doubt it would not be a sincere
ambivalence if Wordsworth were really saying farewell to
poetry, it would merely be an attempt at self-consolation. But
he is not saying farewell to poetry, he is saying farewell to
Eden, and his ambivalence is much what Adam's was, and Milton's, and for the same reasons. 10
To speak naturalistically of the quasi-mystical experiences
10 Milton provides a possible gloss to several difficult points in the
poem.
In stanza vm, the Child is addressed as "thou Eye among the blind," and
to
the Eye are applied the epithets "deaf and silent"; Coleridge objected to
these
epithets as Irrational, but his objection may be met by citing the
brilliant
precedent of "blind mouths" of "Lycidas." Again, Coleridge's question of
the
propriety of making a master brood over a slave is in part answered by
the
The Immortality Ode 149
of his childhood does not in the least bring into question the
value which Wordsworth attached to them, for, despite its
dominating theistical metaphor, the Ode is largely naturalistic
in its intention. We can begin to see what that intention is by
understanding the force of the word "imperial" in stanza vi.
This stanza is the second of the four stanzas in which Wordsworth states and develops the theme of the reminiscence of the
light of heaven and its gradual evanescence through the ma-
turing years. In stanza v we are told that the infant inhabits it;
the Boy beholds it, seeing it "in his joy"; the Youth is still attended by it; "the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into
the light of common day." Stanza vi speaks briefly of the efforts
made by earthly life to bring about the natural and inevitable
amnesia:
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.
"Imperial" suggests grandeur, dignity, and splendor, everything that stands in opposition to what, in The Excursion,
Wordsworth was to call "littleness." And "littleness" is the
result of having wrong notions about the nature of man and
his connection with the universe; its outcome is "deadness."
The melancholy and despair of the Solitary in The Excursion
are the signs of the deadness which resulted from his having
conceived of man as something less than imperial. Wordsworth's idea of splendid power is his protest against all views
sonnet "On His Being Arrived at the Age of Twenty- three," in which
Milton
expresses his security in his development as it shall take place in his
"great
Task-master's eye/' Between this sonnet and the Ode there are other
significant
correspondences of thought and of phrase, as there also are in the
sonnet "On
His Blindness."
The Liberal Imagination
of the mind that would limit and debase it. By conceiving, as
he does, an intimate connection between mind and universe,
by seeing the universe fitted to the mind and the mind to the
universe, he bestows upon man a dignity which cannot be derived from looking at him in the actualities of common life,
from seeing him engaged in business, in morality and politics.
Yet here we must credit Wordsworth with the double vision.
Man must be conceived of as "imperial," but he must also be
seen as he actually is in the field of life. The earth is not an
environment in which the celestial or imperial qualities can
easily exist. Wordsworth, who spoke of the notion of imperial
pre-existence as being adumbrated by Adam's fall, uses the
words "earth" and "earthly" in the common quasi-religious
sense to refer to the things of this world. He does not make
Earth synonymous with Nature, for although Man may be the
true child of Nature, he is the "Foster-child" of Earth. But it
is to be observed that the foster mother is a kindly one, that
her disposition is at least quasi-maternal, that her aims are at
least not unworthy; she is, in short, the foster mother who
figures so often in the legend of the Hero, whose real and unknown parents are noble or divine. 11
Wordsworth, in short, is looking at man in a double way,
seeing man both in his ideal nature and in his earthly activity.
The two views do not so much contradict as supplement each
other. If in stanzas v-vui Wordsworth tells us that we live by
decrease, in stanzas ix-xi he tells us of the everlasting connection of the diminished person with his own ideal personality. The child hands on to the hampered adult the imperial
nature, the "primal sympathy / Which having been must ever
be," the mind fitted to the universe, the universe to the mind.
The sympathy is not so pure and intense in maturity as in
11 Carlyle makes elaborate play with this idea in his account of Teufels-
drockh, and see the essay on The Princess Casamassima in this volume,
page
62. The fantasy that their parents are really foster parents is a common
one
with children, and it is to be associated with the various forms of the
belief
that the world is not real.
The Immortality Ode 151
childhood, but only because another relation grows up beside
the relation of man to Nature the relation of man to his
fellows in the moral world of difficulty and pain. Given Wordsworth's epistemology the new relation is bound to change the
very aspect of Nature itself: the clouds will take a sober coloring from an eye that hath kept watch o'er man's mortality, but
a sober color is a color still.
There is sorrow in the Ode, the inevitable sorrow of giving
up an old habit of vision for a new one. In shifting the center
of his interest from Nature to man in the field of morality
Wordsworth is fulfilling his own conception of the three ages
of man which Professor Beatty has expounded so well. The
shift in interest he called the coming of "the philosophic
mind/' but the w r ord "philosophic" does not have here either
of two of its meanings in common usage it does not mean
abstract and it does not mean apathetic. Wordsworth is not
saying, and it is sentimental and unimaginative of us to say,
that he has become less a feeling man and less a poet. He is
only saying that he has become less a youth. Indeed, the Ode
is so little a farewell to art, so little a dirge sung over departing
powers, that it is actually the very opposite it is a welcome of
new powers and a dedication to a new poetic subject. For if
sensitivity and responsiveness be among the poetic powers,
what else is Wordsworth saying at the end of the poem except
that he has a greater sensitivity and responsiveness than ever
before? The "philosophic mind" has not decreased but, on the
contrary, increased the power to feeL
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
152 The Liberal Imagination
The meanest flower is significant now not only because, like
the small celandine, it speaks of age, suffering, and death, but
because to a man who is aware of man's mortality the world
becomes significant and precious. The knowledge of man's
mortality this must be carefully noted in a poem presumably
about immortality now replaces the "glory" as the agency
which makes things significant and precious. We are back
again at optics, which we have never really left, and the Ode
in a very honest fashion has come full circle.
The new poetic powers of sensitivity and responsiveness are
new not so much in degree as in kind; they would therefore
seem to require a new poetic subject matter for their exercise.
And the very definition of the new powers seems to imply what
the new subject matter must be thoughts that lie too deep
for tears are ideally the thoughts which are brought to mind
by tragedy. It would be an extravagant but not an absurd reading of the Ode that found it to be Wordsworth's farewell to
the characteristic mode of his poetry, the mode that Keats
called the "egotistical sublime" and a dedication to the mode
of tragedy. But the tragic mode could not be Wordsworth's.
He did not have the "negative capability" which Keats believed to be the source of Shakespeare's power, the gift of being able to be "content with half-knowledge," to give up the
"irritable reaching after fact and reason," to remain "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts." In this he was at one with all
the poets of the Romantic Movement and after negative
capability was impossible for them to come by and tragedy was
not for them. But although Wordsworth did not realize the
new kind of art which seems implied by his sense of new
powers, yet his bold declaration that he had acquired a new
way of feeling makes it impossible for us to go on saying that
the Ode was his "conscious farewell to his art, a dirge sung over
his departing powers."
Still, was there not, after the composition of the Ode, a great
falling off in his genius which we are drawn to connect with
The Immortality Ode 153
the crucial changes the Ode records? That there was a falling
off is certain, although we must observe that it was not so sharp
as is commonly held and also that it did not occur immediately
or even soon after the composition of the first four stanzas with
their statement that the visionary gleam had gone; on the con-
trary, some of the most striking of Wordsworth's verse was
written at this time. It must be remembered too that another
statement of the loss of the visionary gleam, that made in
"Tintern Abbey/' had been followed by all the superb production of the "great decade" an objection which is sometimes dealt with by saying that Wordsworth wrote his best
work from his near memories of the gleam, and that, as he
grew older and moved farther from it, his recollection dimmed
and thus he lost his power: it is an explanation which suggests
that mechanical and simple notions of the mind and of the
poetic process are all too tempting to those w r ho speculate on
Wordsworth's decline. Given the fact of the great power, the
desire to explain its relative deterioration will no doubt always
be irresistible. But we must be aware, in any attempt to make
this explanation, that an account of why Wordsworth ceased
to write great poetry must at the same time be an account of
how he once did write great poetry. And this latter account, in
our present state of knowledge, we cannot begin to furnish.
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections
of Early Childhood
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
The Child is -father of the Alan;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
I
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream
The earth, and every common sight,
154 The Liberal Imagination
To me did seem
Apparelled In celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
ii
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
in
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd boy!
The Immortality Ode 155
IV
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
v
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Liberal Imagination
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
VI
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.
VII
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
The Immortality Ode 157
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
VIII
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philospher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
IX
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:
The Liberal Imagination
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy.
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
x
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the Mayl
The Immortality Ode 159
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
XI
And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Art and Neurosis
The question of the mental health of the artist has engaged
the attention of our culture since the beginning of the Romantic Movement. Before that time it was commonly said
that the poet was "mad," but this was only a manner of
speaking, a way of saying that the mind of the poet worked
in different fashion from the mind of the philosopher; it
had no real reference to the mental hygiene of the man who
was the poet. But in the early nineteenth century, with the
development of a more elaborate psychology and a stricter
and more literal view of mental and emotional normality, the
statement was more strictly and literally intended. So much
so, indeed, that Charles Lamb, who knew something about
madness at close quarters and a great deal about art, undertook to refute in his brilliant essay, "On the Sanity of True
Genius," the idea that the exercise of the imagination was a
kind of insanity. And some eighty years later, the idea having yet further entrenched itself, Bernard Shaw felt called
upon to argue the sanity of art, but his cogency was of no
more avail than Lamb's. In recent years the connection between art and mental illness has been formulated not only by
those who are openly or covertly hostile to art, but also and
more significantly by those who are most intensely partisan
to it. The latter willingly and even eagerly accept the idea
that the artist is mentally ill and go on to make his illness a
condition of his power to tell the truth.
This conception of artistic genius is indeed one of the
160
Art and Neurosis 161
characteristic notions of our culture. I should like to bring
it into question. To do so is to bring also into question certain early ideas of Freud's and certain conclusions which literary laymen have drawn from the whole tendency of the
Freudian psychology. From the very start it was recognized
that psychoanalysis was likely to have important things to
say about art and artists. Freud himself thought so, yet when
he first addressed himself to the subject he said many clumsy
and misleading things. I have elsewhere and at length tried
to separate the useful from the useless and even dangerous
statements about art that Freud has made. 1 To put it briefly
here, Freud had some illuminating and even beautiful insights into certain particular works of art which made complex use of the element of myth. Then, without specifically
undertaking to do so, his "Beyond the Pleasure Principle*'
offers a brilliant and comprehensive explanation of our interest in tragedy. And what is of course most important of
all it is a point to which I shall return Freud, by the whole
tendency of his psychology, establishes the naturalness of
artistic thought. Indeed, it is possible to say of Freud that he
ultimately did more for our understanding of art than any
other writer since Aristotle; and this being so, it can only be
surprising that in his early work he should have made the error
of treating the artist as a neurotic who escapes from reality by
means of "substitute gratifications."
As Freud went forward he insisted less on this simple formulation. Certainly it did not have its original force with
him when, at his seventieth birthday celebration, he disclaimed the right to be called the discoverer of the unconscious, saying that whatever he may have done for the systematic understanding of the unconscious, the credit for its
discovery properly belonged to the literary masters. And psychoanalysis has inherited from him a tenderness for art which
is real although sometimes clumsy, and nowadays most psy-
i See "Freud and Literature/*
162 The Liberal Imagination
choanalysts of any personal sensitivity are embarrassed by
occasions which seem to lead them to reduce art to a formula
of mental illness. Nevertheless Freud's early belief in the
essential neuroticism of the artist found an all too fertile
ground found, we might say, the very ground from which
it first sprang, for, when he spoke of the artist as a neurotic,
Freud was adopting one of the popular beliefs of his age.
Most readers will see this belief as the expression of the industrial rationalization and the bourgeois philistinism of the
nineteenth century. In this they are partly right. The nineteenth century established the basic virtue of "getting up at
eight, shaving close at a quarter-past, breakfasting at nine,
going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and
dining at seven." The Messrs. Podsnap who instituted this
scheduled morality inevitably decreed that the arts must celebrate it and nothing else. * 'Nothing else to be permitted to
these . . . vagrants the Arts, on pain of excommunication.
Nothing else To Be anywhere!" We observe that the vir-
tuous day ends with dinner bed and sleep are naturally not
part of the Reality that Is, and nothing must be set forth
which will, as Mr. Podsnap put it, bring a Blush to the Cheek
of a Young Person.
The excommunication of the arts, when it was found
necessary, took the form of pronouncing the artist mentally
degenerate, a device which eventually found its theorist in
Max Nordau. In the history of the arts this is new. The poet
was always known to belong to a touchy tribe genus irritabile was a tag anyone would know and ever since Plato
the process of the inspired imagination, as we have said, was
thought to be a special one of some interest, which the similitude of madness made somewhat intelligible. But this is not
quite to say that the poet was the victim of actual mental
aberration. The eighteenth century did not find the poet to
be less than other men, and certainly the Renaissance did
not. If he was a professional, there might be condescension
Art and Neurosis 163
to his social status, but in a time which deplored all professionalism whatever, this was simply a way of asserting the high
value of poetry, which ought not to be compromised by trade.
And a certain good nature marked even the snubbing of the
professional. At any rate, no one was likely to identify the poet
with the weakling. Indeed, the Renaissance ideal held poetry
to be, like arms or music, one of the signs of manly competence.
The change from this view of things cannot be blamed
wholly on the bourgeois or philistine public. Some of the
* 'blame" must rest with the poets themselves. The Romantic
poets were as proud of their art as the vaunting poets of the
sixteenth century, but one of them talked with an angel in a
tree and insisted that Hell was better than Heaven and sexuality holier than chastity; another told the world that he wanted
to lie down like a tired child and weep away this life of
care; another asked so foolish a question as "Why did I laugh
tonight?"; and yet another explained that he had written one
of his best poems in a drugged sleep. The public took them all
at their word they were not as other men. Zola, in the interests of science, submitted himself to examination by fifteen
psychiatrists and agreed with their conclusion that his genius
had its source in the neurotic elements of his temperament.
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine found virtue and strength in
their physical and mental illness and pain. W. H. Auden addresses his "wound" in the cherishing language of a lover,
thanking it for the gift of insight it has bestowed. "Knowing
you," he says, "has made me understand." And Edmund Wilson in his striking phrase, "the wound and the bow," has formulated for our time the idea of the characteristic sickness of the
artist, which he represents by the figure of Philoctetes, the
Greek warrior who was forced to live in isolation because of
the disgusting odor of a suppurating wound and who yet had
to be sought out by his countrymen because they had need of
the magically unerring bow he possessed.
The myth of the sick artist, we may suppose, has established
164 The Liberal Imagination
itself because it is of advantage to the various groups who have
one or another relation with art. To the artist himself the
myth gives some of the ancient powers and privileges of the
idiot and the fool, half-prophetic creatures, or of the mutilated
priest. That the artist's neurosis may be but a mask is suggested by Thomas Mann's pleasure in representing his untried
youth as "sick" but his successful maturity as senatorially robust. By means of his belief in his own sickness, the artist may
the more easily fulfill his chosen, and assigned, function of
putting himself into connection with the forces of spirituality
and morality; the artist sees as insane the "normal" and
"healthy" ways of established society, while aberration and
illness appear as spiritual and moral health if only because
they controvert the ways of respectable society.
Then too, the myth has its advantage for the philistine
a double advantage. On the one hand, the belief in the
artist's neuroticism allows the philistine to shut his ears to
what the artist says. But on the other hand it allows him to
listen. For we must not make the common mistake the contemporary philistine does want to listen, at the same time that
he wants to shut his ears. By supposing that the artist has an
interesting but not always reliable relation to reality, he is
able to contain (in the military sense) what the artist tells him.
If he did not want to listen at all, he would say "insane"; with
"neurotic," which hedges, he listens when he chooses.
And in addition to its advantage to the artist and to the
philistine, we must take into account the usefulness of the
myth to a third group, the group of "sensitive" people, who,
although not artists, are not philistines either. These people
form a group by virtue of their passive impatience with philistinism, and also by virtue of their awareness of their own emotional pain and uncertainty. To these people the myth of the
sick artist is the institutional sanction of their situation; they
seek to approximate or acquire the character of the artist,
sometimes by planning to work or even attempting to work
Art and Neurosis 165
as the artist does, always by making a connection between their
own powers of mind and their consciousness of "difference"
and neurotic illness.
The early attempts of psychoanalysis to deal with art went
on the assumption that, because the artist was neurotic, the
content of his work was also neurotic, which is to say that it
did not stand in a correct relation to reality. But nowadays, as
I have said, psychoanalysis is not likely to be so simple in its
transactions with art. A good example of the psychoanalytical
development in this respect is Dr. Saul Rosenzweig's wellknown essay, "The Ghost of Henry James/' 2 This is an admirable piece of work, marked by accuracy in the reporting of the
literary fact and by respect for the value of the literary object.
Although Dr. Rosenzweig explores the element of neurosis in
James's life and work, he nowhere suggests that this element
in any way lessens James's value as an artist or moralist. In
effect he says that neurosis is a way of dealing with reality
which, in real life, is uncomfortable and uneconomical, but
that this judgment of neurosis in life cannot mechanically be
transferred to works of art upon which neurosis has had its
influence. He nowhere implies that a work of art in whose
genesis a neurotic element may be found is for that reason irrelevant or in any way diminished in value. Indeed, the manner of his treatment suggests, what is of course the case, that
every neurosis deals with a real emotional situation of the most
intensely meaningful kind.
Yet as Dr. Rosenzweig brings his essay to its close, he makes
use of the current assumption about the causal connection between the psychic illness of the artist and his power. His investigation of James, he says, "reveals the aptness of the Philoctetes pattern/' He accepts the idea of "the sacrificial roots
of literary power" and speaks of "the unhappy sources of
James's genius." "The broader application of the inherent pat-
2 First published in Character and Personality, December 1945, and
reprinted
in Partisan Review, Fall, 1944.
166 The Liberal Imagination
tern," he says, "is familiar to readers of Edmund Wilson's recent volume The Wound and the Bow. . . . Reviewing the
experience and work of several well-known literary masters,
Wilson discloses the sacrificial roots of their power on the
model of the Greek legend. In the case of Henry James, the
present account . . . provides a similar insight into the unhappy sources of his genius. . . ."
This comes as a surprise. Nothing in Dr. Rosenzweig's
theory requires it. For his theory asserts no more than that
Henry James, predisposed by temperament and family situation to certain mental and emotional qualities, was in his
youth injured in a way which he believed to be sexual; that he
unconsciously invited the injury in the wish to identify himself with his father, who himself had been similarly injured
"castrated": a leg had been amputated and under strikingly
similar circumstances; this resulted for the younger Henry
James in a certain pattern of life and in a preoccupation in his
work with certain themes which more or less obscurely symbolize his sexual situation. For this I think Dr. 'Rosenzweig makes
a sound case. Yet I submit that this is not the same thing as
disclosing the roots of James's power or discovering the sources
of his genius. The essay which gives Edmund Wilson's book
its title and cohering principle does not explicitly say that the
roots of power are sacrificial and that the source of genius is
unhappy. Where it is explicit, it states only that "genius and
disease, like strength and mutilation, may be inextricably
bound up together/' which of course, on its face, says no more
than that personality is integral and not made up of detachable
parts; and from this there is no doubt to be drawn the important practical and moral implication that we cannot judge or
dismiss a man's genius and strength because of our awareness
of his disease or mutilation. The Philoctetes legend in itself
does not suggest anything beyond this. It does not suggest that
the wound is the price of the bow, or that without the wound
the bow may not be possessed or drawn. Yet Dr. Rosenzweig
Art and Neurosis 167
has accurately summarized the force and, I think, the intention
of Mr. Wilson's whole book; its several studies do seem to say
that effectiveness in the arts does depend on sickness.
An examination of this prevalent idea might well begin
with the observation of how pervasive and deeply rooted is
the notion that power may be gained by suffering. Even at
relatively high stages of culture the mind seems to take easily
to the primitive belief that pain and sacrifice are connected
with strength. Primitive beliefs must be treated with respectful alertness to their possible truth and also with the suspicion
of their being magical and irrational, and it is worth noting
on both sides of the question, and in the light of what we have
said about the ambiguous relation of the neurosis to reality,
that the whole economy of the neurosis is based exactly on this
idea of the quid pro quo of sacrificial pain: the neurotic person
unconsciously subscribes to a system whereby he gives up some
pleasure or power, or inflicts pain on himself in order to secure
some other power or some other pleasure.
In the ingrained popular conception of the relation between suffering and power there are actually two distinct although related ideas. One is that there exists in the individual
a fund of power which has outlets through various organs or
faculties, and that if its outlet through one organ or faculty be
prevented, it will flow to increase the force or sensitivity o
another. Thus it is popularly believed that the sense of touch
is intensified in the blind not so much by the will of the blind
person to adapt himself to the necessities of his situation as,
rather, by a sort of mechanical redistribution of power. And
this idea would seem to explain, if not the origin of the ancient
mutilation of priests, then at least a common understanding
of their sexual sacrifice.
The other idea is that a person may be taught by, or proved
by, the endurance of pain. There will easily come to mind the
ritual suffering that is inflicted at the tribal initiation of youths
into full manhood or at the admission of the apprentice into
168 The Liberal Imagination
the company of journeyman adepts. This idea in sophisticated
form found its way into high religion at least as early as Aeschylus, who held that man achieves knowledge of God through
suffering, and it was from the beginning an important element
of Christian thought. In the nineteenth century the Christian-
ized notion of the didactic suffering of the artist went along
with the idea of his mental degeneration and even served as
a sort of countermyth to it. Its doctrine was that the artist, a
man of strength and health, experienced and suffered, and
thus learned both the facts of life and his artistic craft. "I am
the man, I suffered, I was there/' ran his boast, and he derived
his authority from the knowledge gained through suffering.
There can be no doubt that both these ideas represent a
measure of truth about mental and emotional power. The
idea of didactic suffering expresses a valuation of experience
and of steadfastness. The idea of natural compensation for the
sacrifice of some faculty also says something that can be rationally defended: one cannot be and do everything and the wholehearted absorption in any enterprise, art for example, means
that we must give up other possibilities, even parts of ourselves. And there is even a certain validity to the belief that the
individual has a fund of undifferentiated energy which presses
the harder upon what outlets are available to it when it has
been deprived of the normal number.
Then, in further defense of the belief that artistic power is
connected with neurosis, we can say that there is no doubt that
what we call mental illness may be the source of psychic knowledge. Some neurotic people, because they are more apprehensive than normal people, are able to see more of certain parts of
reality and to see them with more intensity. And many neurotic or psychotic patients are in certain respects in closer touch
with the actualities of the unconscious than are normal people.
Further, the expression of a neurotic or psychotic conception
of reality is likely to be more intense than a normal one.
Art and Neurosis 169
Yet when we have said all this, it is still wrong, I believe, to
find the root of the artist's power and the source of his genius
in neurosis. To the idea that literary power and genius spring
from pain and neurotic sacrifice there are two major objec-
tions. The first has to do with the assumed uniqueness of the
artist as a subject of psychoanalytical explanation. The second
has to do with the true meaning of power and genius.
One reason why writers are considered to be more available
than other people to psychoanalytical explanation is that they
tell us what is going on inside them. Even when they do not
make an actual diagnosis of their malaises or describe "symptoms," we must bear it in mind that it is their profession to
deal with fantasy in some form or other. It is in the nature of
the writer's job that he exhibit his unconscious. He may disguise it in various ways, but disguise is not concealment. Indeed, it may be said that the more a writer takes pains with his
work to remove it from the personal and subjective, the more
and not the less he will express his true unconscious, although not what passes with most for the unconscious.
Further, the writer is likely to be a great hand at personal
letters, diaries, and autobiographies: indeed, almost the only
good autobiographies are those of writers. The writer is more
aware of what happens to him or goes on in him and often finds
it necessary or useful to be articulate about his inner states,
and prides himself on telling the truth. Thus, only a man as
devoted to the truth of the emotions as Henry James was
would have informed the world, despite his characteristic
reticence, of an accident so intimate as his. We must not of
course suppose that a writer's statements about his intimate
life are equivalent to true statements about his unconscious,
which, by definition, he doesn't consciously know; but they
may be useful clues to the nature of an entity about which we
can make statements of more or less cogency, although never
statements of certainty; or they at least give us what is surely
i^o The Liberal Imagination
related to a knowledge of his unconscious that is, an insight
into his personality. 3
But while the validity of dealing with the writer's intellectual life in psychoanalytical terms is taken for granted, the
psychoanalytical explanation of the intellectual life of scientists is generally speaking not countenanced. The old myth of
the mad scientist, with the exception of an occasional mad
psychiatrist, no longer exists. The social position of science
requires that it should cease, which leads us to remark that
those partisans of art who insist on explaining artistic genius
by means of psychic imbalance are in effect capitulating to the
dominant mores which hold that the members of the respectable professions are, however dull they may be, free from
neurosis. Scientists, to continue with them as the best example
of the respectable professions, do not usually give us the clues
to their personalities which writers habitually give. But no
one who has ever lived observantly among scientists will claim
that they are without an unconscious or even that they are free
from neurosis. How often, indeed, it is apparent that the devotion to science, if it cannot be called a neurotic manifestation,
at least can be understood as going very cozily with neurotic
elements in the temperament, such as, for example, a marked
compulsiveness. Of scientists as a group we can say that they
are less concerned with the manifestations of personality, their
own or others', than are writers as a group. But this relative
indifference is scarcely a sign of normality indeed, if we
choose to regard it with the same sort of eye with which the
characteristics of writers are regarded, we might say the indifference to matters of personality is in itself a suspicious evasion.
s I am by no means in agreement with the statements of Dr. Edmund
Bergler about "the" psychology of the writer, but I think that Dr. Bergler has
done
good service in warning us against taking at their face value a writer's
statements about himself, the more especially when they are "frank." Thus,
to
take Dr. Bergler 's notable example, it is usual for biographers to accept
Stendhal's statements about his open sexual feelings for his mother when he
was
a little boy, feelings which went with an intense hatred of his father.
But Dr.
Bergler believes that Stendhal unconsciously used his consciousness of
his love
Art and Neurosis 171
It is the basic assumption of psychoanalysis that the acts of
every person are influenced by the forces of the unconscious.
Scientists, bankers, lawyers, or surgeons, by reason of the traditions of their professions, practice concealment and conformity; but it is difficult to believe that an investigation
according to psychoanalytical principles would fail to show
that the strains and imbalances of their psyches are not of the
same frequency as those of writers, and of similar kind. I do
not mean that everybody has the same troubles and identical
psyches, but only that there is no special category for writers. 4
If this is so, and if we still want to relate the writer's power
to his neurosis, we must be willing to relate all intellectual
power to neurosis. We must find the roots of Newton's power
in his emotional extravagances, and the roots of Darwin's
power in his sorely neurotic temperament, and the roots of
Pascal's mathematical genius in the impulses which drove him
to extreme religious masochism I choose but the classic examples. If we make the neurosis-power equivalence at all, we
must make it in every field of endeavor. Logician, 'economist,
botanist, physicist, theologian no profession may be so respectable or so remote or so rational as to be exempt from the
psychological interpretation. 5
Further, not only power but also failure or limitation must
of his mother and of his hatred of his father to mask an unconscious
love of
his father, which frightened him. ("Psychoanalysis of Writers and of
Literary
Productivity" in Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, vol. i.)
* Dr. Bergler believes that there is a particular neurosis of writers,
based on
an oral masochism which makes them the enemy of the respectable
world,
courting poverty and persecution. But a later development of Dr.
Bergler's
theory of oral masochism makes it the basic neurosis, not only of
writers but of
everyone who is neurotic.
s In his interesting essay, "Writers and Madness" (Partisan Review,
JanuaryFebruary 1947), William Barrett has taken issue with this point and has
insisted that a clear distinction is to be made between the relation that
exists
between the scientist and his work and the relation that exists between
the
artist and his work. The difference, as I understand it, is in the claims of
the
ego. The artist's ego makes a claim upon the world which is personal in
a way
that the scientist's is not, for the scientist, although he does indeed
want prestige and thus "responds to one of the deepest urges of his ego, it is only
that
his prestige may come to attend his person through the public world of
other
172 The Liberal Imagination
be accounted for by the theory of neurosis, and not merely
failure or limitation in life but even failure or limitation in
art. Thus it is often said that the warp of Dostoevski's mind
accounts for the brilliance of his psychological insights. But it
is never said that the same warp of Dostoevski's mind also accounted for his deficiency in insight. Freud, who greatly admired Dostoevski, although he did not like him, observed that
"his insight was entirely restricted to the workings of the abnormal psyche. Consider his astounding helplessness before
the phenomenon of love; he really only understands either
crude, instinctive desire or masochistic submission or love
from pity." 6 This, we must note, is not merely Freud's comment on the extent of the province which Dostoevski chose
for his own, but on his failure to understand what, given the
province of his choice, he might be expected to understand.
And since neurosis can account not only for intellectual
men; and It is not in the end his own being that is exhibited or his own
voice
that is heard in the learned report to the Academy." Actually, however,
as is
suggested by the sense which mathematicians have of the style of
mathematical
thought, the creation of the abstract thinker is as deeply involved as the
artist's
see An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field
by
Jacques Hadamard, Princeton University Press, 1945 and he quite as
much as
the artist seeks to impose himself, to express himself. I am of course
not main-
taining that the processes of scientific thought are the same as those of
artistic
thought, or even that the scientist's creation is involved with his total
personality in the same way that the artist's is I am maintaining only that
the
scientist's creation is as deeply implicated with his total personality as is
the
artist's.
This point of view seems to be supported by Freud's monograph on
Leonardo. One of the problems that Freud sets himself is to discover why
an artist
of the highest endowment should have devoted himself more and
more to
scientific investigation, with the result that he was unable to complete
his
artistic enterprises. The particular reasons for this that Freud assigns
need
not be gone into here; all that I wish to suggest is that Freud
understands
these reasons to be the working out of an inner conflict, the attempt to
deal
with the difficulties that have their roots in the most primitive
situations.
Leonardo's scientific investigations were as necessary and "compelled"
and they
constituted as much of a claim on the whole personality as an> thing
the artist
undertakes; and so far from being carried out for the sake of public
prestige,
they were largely private and personal, and were thought by the public
of his
time to be something very like insanity.
e From a letter quoted in Theodor Reik's From Thirty Years With Freud,
p. 175.
Art and Neurosis
success and for failure or limitation but also for mediocrity,
we have most of society involved in neurosis. To this I have
no objection I think most of society is indeed involved in
neurosis. But with neurosis accounting for so much, it cannot
be made exclusively to account for one man's literary power.
We have now to consider what is meant by genius when its
source is identified as the sacrifice and pain of neurosis.
In the case of Henry James, the reference to the neurosis of
his personal life does indeed tell us something about the latent
intention of his work and thus about the reason for some large
part of its interest for us. But if genius and its source are what
we are dealing with, we must observe that the reference to
neurosis tells us nothing about James's passion, energy, and
devotion, nothing about his architectonic skill, nothing about
the other themes that were important to him which are not
connected with his unconscious concern with castration. We
cannot, that is, make the writer's inner life exactly equivalent
to his power of expressing it. Let us grant for the sake of argument that the literary genius, as distinguished from other men,
is the victim of a "mutilation" and that his fantasies are neu-
rotic. 7 It does not then follow as the inevitable next step that
his ability to express these fantasies and to impress us with
them is neurotic, for that ability is what we mean by his genius.
Anyone might be injured as Henry James was, and even respond within himself to the injury as James is said to have
done, and yet not have his literary power.
The reference to the artist's neurosis tells us something
about the material on which the artist exercises his powers,
and even something about his reasons for bringing his powers
into play, but it does not tell us anything about the source of
7 I am using the word fantasy y unless modified, in a neutral sense. A
fantasy,
in this sense, may be distinguished from the representation of
something that
actually exists, but it is not opposed to "reality" and not an "escape"
from
reality. Thus the idea of a rational society, or the image of a good house
to be
built, as well as the story of something that could never really happen,
is a
fantasy. There may be neurotic or non-neurotic fantasies.
174 The Liberal Imagination
his power, it makes no causal connection between them and
the neurosis. And if we look into the matter, we see that there
is in fact no causal connection between them. For, still granting that the poet is uniquely neurotic, what is surely not neurotic, what indeed suggests nothing but health, is his power of
using his neuroticism. He shapes his fantasies, he gives them
social form and reference. Charles Lamb's way of putting this
cannot be improved. Lamb is denying that genius is allied to
insanity; for "insanity" the modern reader may substitute
"neurosis." ''The ground of the mistake/' he says, "is, that
men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition
of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own ex-
perience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and
fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But
the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his
subject but has dominion over it. ... Where he seems most
to recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it.
From beyond the scope of nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her consistency. He is
beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, when he appears
most to betray and desert her. . . . Herein the great and the
little wits are differenced; that if the latter wander ever so
little from nature or natural existence, they lose themselves
and their readers. . . . They do not create, which implies
shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not active
for to be active is to call something into act and form but
passive as men in sick dreams."
The activity of the artist, we must remember, may be approximated by many who are themselves not artists. Thus, the
expressions of many schizophrenic people have the intense appearance of creativity and an inescapable interest and signifi-
cance. But they are not works of art, and although Van Gogh
may have been schizophrenic he was in addition an artist.
Again, as I have already suggested, it is not uncommon in our
society for certain kinds of neurotic people to imitate the artist
Art and Neurosis 175
in his life and even in his ideals and ambitions. They follow
the artist in everything except successful performance. It was,
I think, Otto Rank who called such people half-artists and
confirmed the diagnosis of their neuroticism at the same time
that he differentiated them from true artists.
Nothing is so characteristic of the artist as his power of shaping his work, of subjugating his raw material, however aberrant it be from what we call normality, to the consistency of
nature. It would be impossible to deny that whatever disease
or mutilation the artist may suffer is an element of his pro-
duction which has its effect on every part of it, but disease and
mutilation are available to us all life provides them with
prodigal generosity. What marks the artist is his power to
shape the material of pain we all have.
At this point, with our recognition of life's abundant provision of pain, we are at the very heart of our matter, which
is the meaning we may assign to neurosis and the relation we
are to suppose it to have with normality. Here Freud himself
can be of help, although it must be admitted that what he tells
us may at first seem somewhat contradictory and confusing.
Freud's study of Leonardo da Vinci is an attempt to understand why Leonardo was unable to pursue his artistic enterprises, feeling compelled instead to advance his scientific
investigations. The cause of this Freud traces back to certain
childhood experiences not different in kind from the experiences which Dr. Rosenzweig adduces to account for certain
elements in the work of Henry James. And when he has completed his study Freud makes this caveat: "Let us expressly
emphasize that we have never considered Leonardo as a neurotic. . . . We no longer believe that health and disease,
normal and nervous, are sharply distinguished from each
other. We know today that neurotic symptoms are substitutive
formations for certain repressive acts which must result in the
course of our development from the child to the cultural man,
that we all produce such substitutive formations, and that
176 The Liberal Imagination
only the amount, intensity, and distribution of these substitutive formations justify the practical conception of illness. . . ." The statement becomes the more striking when
we remember that in the course of his study Freud has had
occasion to observe that Leonardo was both homosexual and
sexually inactive. I am not sure that the statement that Leonardo was not a neurotic is one that Freud would have made at
every point in the later development of psychoanalysis, yet it
is in conformity with his continuing notion of the genesis of
culture. And the practical, the quantitative or economic, conception of illness he insists on in a passage in the Introductory
Lectures. "The neurotic symptoms/' he says, ". . . are activities which are detrimental, or at least useless, to life as a whole;
the person concerned frequently complains of them as obnoxious to him or they involve suffering and distress for him.
The principal injury they inflict lies in the expense of energy
they entail, and, besides this, in the energy needed to combat
them. Where the symptoms are extensively developed, these
two kinds of effort may exact such a price that the person
suffers a very serious impoverishment in available mental
energy which consequently disables him for all the important
tasks of life. This result depends principally upon the amount
of energy taken up in this way; therefore you will see that
'illness' is essentially a practical conception. But if you look at
the matter from a theoretical point of view and ignore this
question of degree, you can very well see that we are all ill,
i.e., neurotic; for the conditions required for symptomformation are demonstrable also in normal persons."
We are all ill: the statement is grandiose, and its implications the implications, that is, of understanding the totality
of human nature in the terms of disease are vast. These implications have never been properly met (although I believe
that a few theologians have responded to them), but this is not
the place to attempt to meet them. I have brought forward
Freud's statement of the essential sickness of the psyche only
Art and Neurosis 177
because it stands as the refutation of what is implied by the
literary use of the theory of neurosis to account for genius. For
if we are all ill, and if, as I have said, neurosis can account for
everything, for failure and mediocrity "a very serious impoverishment of available mental energy" as well as for
genius, it cannot uniquely account for genius.
This, however, is not to say that there is no connection between neurosis and genius, which would be tantamount, as we
see, to saying that there is no connection between human nature and genius. But the connection lies wholly in a particular
and special relation which the artist has to neurosis.
In order to understand what this particular and special connection is we must have clearly in mind what neurosis is. The
current literary conception of neurosis as a wound is quite misleading. It inevitably suggests passivity, whereas, if we follow
Freud, we must understand a neurosis to be an activity, an
activity with a purpose, and a particular kind of activity, a conflict. This is not to say that there are no abnormal mental states
which are not conflicts. There are; the struggle between elements of the unconscious may never be instituted in the first
place, or it may be called off. As Freud says in a passage which
follows close upon the one I last quoted, "If regressions do not
call forth a prohibition on the part of the ego, no neurosis
results; the libido succeeds in obtaining a real, although not a
normal, satisfaction. But if the ego ... is not in agreement
with these regressions, conflict ensues." And in his essay on
Dostoevski Freud says that "there are no neurotic complete
masochists," by which he means that the ego which gives way
completely to masochism (or to any other pathological excess)
has passed beyond neurosis; the conflict has ceased, but at the
cost of the defeat of the ego, and now some other name than
that of neurosis must be given to the condition of the person
who thus takes himself beyond the pain of the neurotic conflict. To understand this is to become aware of the curious
complacency with which literary men regard mental disease.
1*8 The Liberal Imagination
The psyche of the neurotic is not equally complacent; it regards with the greatest fear the chaotic and destructive forces
it contains, and it struggles fiercely to keep them at bay. 8
We come then to a remarkable paradox: we are all ill, but
we are ill in the service of health, or ill in the service of life, or,
at the very least, ill in the service of life-in-culture. The form
of the mind's dynamics is that of the neurosis, which is to be
understood as the ego's struggle against being overcome by
the forces with which it coexists, and the strategy of this conflict requires that the ego shall incur pain and make sacrifices
of itself, at the same time seeing to it that its pain and sacrifice
be as small as they may.
But this is characteristic of all minds: no mind is exempt
except those which refuse the conflict or withdraw from it;
and we ask wherein the mind of the artist is unique. If he is
not unique in neurosis, is he then unique in the significance
and intensity of his neurosis? I do not believe that we shall go
more than a little way toward a definition of artistic genius by
answering this question affirmatively. A neurotic conflict cannot ever be either meaningless or merely personal; it must be
understood as exemplifying cultural forces of great moment,
and this is true of any neurotic conflict at all. To be sure, some
neuroses may be more interesting than others, perhaps because
they are fiercer or more inclusive; and no doubt the writer
s In the article to which I refer in the note on page 171, William Barrett
says
that he prefers the old-fashioned term "madness" to "neurosis." But it
is not
quite for him to choose the words do not differ in fashion but in
meaning.
Most literary people, when they speak of mental illness, refer to
neurosis. Perhaps one reason for this is that the neurosis is the most benign of the
mental
ills. Another reason is surely that psychoanalytical literature deals
chiefly with
the neurosis, and its symptomatology and therapy have become
familiar; psychoanalysis has far less to say about psychosis, for which it can offer far
less
therapeutic hope. Further, the neurosis is easily put into a causal
connection
with the social maladjustments of our time. Other forms of mental
illness of
a more severe and degenerative kind are not so widely recognized by
the literary person and are often assimilated to neurosis with a resulting
confusion.
In the present essay I deal only with the conception of neurosis, but this
should not be taken to imply that I believe that other pathological
mental conditions, including actual madness, do not have relevance to the general
matter
of the discussion.
Art and Neurosis 179
who makes a claim upon our interest is a man who by reason
of the energy and significance of the forces in struggle within
him provides us with the largest representation of the culture
in which we, with him, are involved; his neurosis may thus be
thought of as having a connection of concomitance with his
literary powers. As Freud says in the Dostoevski essay, "the
neurosis . . . comes into being all the more readily the richer
the complexity which has to be controlled by his ego." Yet
even the rich complexity which his ego is doomed to control
is not the definition of the artist's genius, for we can by no
means say that the artist is pre-eminent in the rich complexity
of elements in conflict within him. The slightest acquaintance
with the clinical literature of psychoanalysis will suggest that a
rich complexity of struggling elements is no uncommon possession. And that same literature will also make it abundantly
clear that the devices of art the most extreme devices of
poetry, for example are not particular to the mind of the
artist but are characteristic of mind itself.
But the artist is indeed unique in one respect, in the respect
of his relation to his neurosis. He is what he is by virtue of his
successful obj edification of his neurosis, by his shaping it and
making it available to others in a way which has its effect upon
their own egos in struggle. His genius, that is, may be defined
in terms of his faculties of perception, representation, and
realization, and in these terms alone. It can no more be defined
in terms of neurosis than can his power of walking and talking,
or his sexuality. The use to which he puts his power, or the
manner and style of his power, may be discussed with reference to his particular neurosis, and so may such matters as the
untimely diminution or cessation of its exercise. But its
essence is irreducible. It is, as we say, a gift.
We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea
of health. Of the artist we must say that whatever elements of
neurosis he has in common with his fellow mortals, the one
part of him that is healthy, by any conceivable definition of
iSo The Liberal Imagination
health, Is that which gives him the power to conceive, to plan,
to work, and to bring his work to a conclusion. And if we are
all ill, we are ill by a universal accident, not by a universal
necessity, by a fault in the economy of our powers, not by the
nature of the powers themselves. The Philoctetes myth, when
it is used to imply a causal connection between the fantasy of
castration and artistic power, tells us no more about the source
of artistic power than we learn about the source of sexuality
when the fantasy of castration is adduced, for the fear of castration may explain why a man is moved to extravagant exploits of sexuality, but we do not say that his sexual power
itself derives from his fear of castration; and further the same
fantasy may also explain impotence or homosexuality. The
Philoctetes story, which has so established itself among us as
explaining the source of the artist's power, is not really an
explanatory myth at all; it is a moral myth having reference to
our proper behavior in the circumstances of the universal
accident. In its juxtaposition of the wound and the bow, it
tells us that we must be aware that weakness does not preclude
strength nor strength weakness. It is therefore not irrelevant
to the artist, but when we use it we will do well to keep in
mind the other myths of the arts, recalling what Pan and
Dionysius suggest of the relation of art to physiology and
superabundance, remembering that to Apollo were attributed
the bow and the lyre, two strengths together, and that he was
given the lyre by its inventor, the baby Hermes that miraculous infant who, the day he was born, left his cradle to do
mischief: and the first thing he met with was a tortoise, which
he greeted politely before scooping it from its shell, and,
thought and deed being one with him, he contrived the instrument to which he sang "the glorious tale of his own begetting." These were gods, and very early ones, but their myths
tell us something about the nature and source of art even in
our grim, late human present.
The Sense of the Past
In recent years the study of literature in our universities has
again and again been called into question, chiefly on the
ground that what is being studied is not so much literature
itself as the history of literature. John Jay Chapman was perhaps the first to state the case against the literary scholars when
in 1927 he denounced the "archaeological, quasi-scientific,
and documentary study of the fine arts" because, as he said, it
endeavored "to express the fluid universe of many emotions
in terms drawn from the study of the physical sciences/' And
since Chapman wrote, the issue in the universities has been
clearly drawn in the form of an opposition of "criticism" to
"scholarship." Criticism has been the aggressor, and its assault
upon scholarship has been successful almost in proportion to
the spiritedness with which it has been made; at the present time, although the archaeological and quasi-scientific and
documentary study of literature is still the dominant one in
our universities, it is clear to everyone that scholarship is on
the defensive and is ready to share the rule with its antagonist.
This revision of the academic polity can be regarded only
with satisfaction. The world seems to become less and less responsive to literature; we can even observe that literature is
becoming something like an object of suspicion, and it is possible to say of the historical study of literature that its very
existence is an evidence of this mistrust. De Quincey's categories of knowledge and power are most pertinent here; the
traditional scholarship, in so far as it takes literature to be
181
1 82 The Liberal Imagination
chiefly an object of knowledge, denies or obscures that active
power by which literature is truly defined. All sorts of studies
are properly ancillary to the study of literature. For example,
the study of the intellectual conditions in which a work of
literature was made is not only legitimate but sometimes even
necessary to our perception of its power. Yet when Professor
Lovejoy in his influential book, The Great Chain of Being,
tells us that for the study of the history of ideas a really dead
writer is better than one whose works are still enjoyed, we
naturally pull up short and wonder if we are not in danger of
becoming like the Edinburgh body-snatchers who saw to it that
there were enough cadavers for study in the medical school.
Criticism made its attack on the historians of literature in
the name of literature as power. The attack was the fiercer
because literary history had all too faithfully followed the lead
of social and political history, which, having given up its traditional connection with literature, had allied itself with the
physical sciences of the nineteenth century and had adopted
the assumption of these sciences that the world was reflected
with perfect literalness in the will-less mind of the observer.
The new history had many successes and it taught literary
study what it had itself learned, that in an age of science
prestige is to be gained by approximating the methods of
science. Of these methods the most notable and most adaptable
was the investigation of genesis, of how the work of art came
into being. I am not concerned to show that the study of genesis is harmful to the right experience of the work of art: I do
not believe it is. Indeed, I am inclined to suppose that whenever the genetic method is attacked we ought to suspect that
special interests are being defended. So far is it from being
true that the genetic method is in itself inimical to the work of
art, that the very opposite is so; a work of art, or any human
thing, studied in its genesis can take on an added value. Still,
the genetic method can easily be vulgarized, and when it is
used in its vulgar form, it can indeed reduce the value of a
The Sense of the Past 183
thing; in much genetic study the implication is clear that to
the scholar the work of art is nothing but its conditions.
One of the attractions of the genetic study of art is that it
seems to offer a high degree of certainty. Aristotle tells us that
every study has its own degree of certainty and that the welltrained man accepts that degree and does not look for a greater
one. We may add that there are different kinds as well as different degrees of certainty, and we can say that the great mis-
take of the scientific-historical scholarship is that it looks for
a degree and kind of certainty that literature does not need
and cannot allow.
The error that is made by literary scholars when they seek
for a certainty analogous with the certainty of science has been
so often remarked that at this date little more need be said of
it. Up to a point the scientific study of art is legitimate and
fruitful; the great thing is that we should recognize the terminal point and not try to push beyond it, that we should not
expect that the scientific study of, say, literature will necessarily assure us of the experience of literature; and if we wish
as teachers to help others to the experience of literature, we
cannot do so by imparting the fruits of our scientific study.
What the partisans of the so-called New Criticism revolted
against was the scientific notion of the fact as transferred in a
literal way to the study of literature. They wished to restore
autonomy to the work of art, to see it as the agent of power
rather than as the object of knowledge.
The faults of these critics we know. Perhaps their chief fault
they share with the scientific-historical scholars themselves
they try too hard. No less than the scholars, the critics fall into
an error that Chapman denounced, the great modern illusion
" that any thing whatever . . . can be discovered through hard
intellectual work and concentration/' We often feel of them
that they make the elucidation of poetic ambiguity or irony
a kind of intellectual calisthenic ritual. Still, we can forgive
them their strenuousness, remembering that something has
X 84 The Liberal Imagination
happened to our relation with language which seems to require that we make methodical and explicit what was once
immediate and unformulated.
But there is another fault of the New Critics of which we
must take notice. It is that in their reaction from the historical
method they forget that the literary work is ineluctably a historical fact, and, what is more important, that its historicity is
a fact in our aesthetic experience. Literature, we may say, must
in some sense always be an historical study, for literature is an
historical art. It is historical in three separate senses.
In the old days the poet was supposed to be himself an historian, a reliable chronicler of events. Thucydides said that he
was likely to be an inaccurate historian, but Aristotle said that
he was more accurate, because more general, than any mere
annalist; and we, following Aristotle, suppose that a large part
of literature is properly historical, the recording and interpreting of personal, national, and cosmological events.
Then literature is historical in the sense that it is necessarily
aware of its own past. It is not always consciously aware of this
past, but it is always practically aware of it. The work of any
poet exists by reason of its connection with past work, both in
continuation and in divergence, and what we call his originality is simply his special relation to tradition. The point has
been fully developed by T. S. Eliot in his well-known essay
"Tradition and the Individual Talent." And Mr. Eliot reminds us how each poet's relation to tradition changes tradition itself, so that the history of literature is never quiet for
long and is never merely an additive kind of growth. Each new
age makes the pattern over again, forgetting what was once
dominant, finding new affinities; we read any work within a
kaleidoscope of historical elements.
And in one more sense literature is historical, and it is with
this sense that I am here chiefly concerned. In the existence of
every work of literature of the past, its historicity, its pastness,
is a factor of great importance. In certain cultures the pastness
The Sense of the Past 185
of a work of art gives it an extra-aesthetic authority which is
incorporated into its aesthetic power. But even in our own
culture with its ambivalent feeling about tradition, there inheres in a work of art of the past a certain quality, an element
of its aesthetic existence, which we can identify as its pastness.
Side by side with the formal elements of the work, and modifying these elements, there is the element of history, which, in
any complete aesthetic analysis, must be taken into account.
The New Critics exercised their early characteristic method
almost exclusively upon lyric poetry, a genre in which the historical element, although of course present, is less obtrusive
than in the long poem, the novel, and the drama. But even in
the lyric poem the factor of historicity is part of the aesthetic
experience; it is not merely a negative condition of the other
elements, such as prosody or diction, which, if they are old
enough, are likely to be insufficiently understood it is itself
a positive aesthetic factor with positive and pleasurable relations to the other aesthetic factors. It is a part of the given of
the work, which we cannot help but respond to. The New
Critics imply that this situation should not exist, but it cannot
help existing, and we have to take it into account.
We are creatures of time, we are creatures of the historical
sense, not only as men have always been but in a new way since
the time of Walter Scott. Possibly this may be for the worse;
we would perhaps be stronger if we believed that Now contained all things, and that we in our barbarian moment were
all that had ever been. Without the sense of the past we might
be more certain, less weighted down and apprehensive. We
might also be less generous, and certainly we would be less
aware. In any case, we have the sense of the past and must live
with it, and by it.
And we must read our literature by it. Try as we will, we
cannot be like Partridge at the play, wholly without the historical sense. The leap of the imagination which an audience
makes when it responds to Hamlet is enormous, and it requires
186 The Liberal Imagination
a comprehensive, although not necessarily a highly instructed,
sense of the past. This sense does not, for most artistic purposes, need to be highly instructed; it can consist largely of the
firm belief that there really is such a thing as the past.
In the New Critics' refusal to take critical account of the
historicity of a work there is, one understands, the impulse to
make the work of the past more immediate and more real, to
deny that between Now and Then there is any essential difference, the spirit of man being one and continuous. But it is
only if we are aware of the reality of the past as past that we can
feel it as alive and present. If, for example, we try to make
Shakespeare literally contemporaneous, we make him monstrous. He is contemporaneous only if we know how much a
man of his own age he was; he is relevant to us only if we see
his distance from us. Or to take a poet closer to us in actual
time, Wordsworth's Immortality Ode is acceptable to us only
when it is understood to have been written at a certain past
moment; if it had appeared much later than it did, if it were
offered to us now as a contemporary work, we would not admire it; and the same is true of The Prelude, which of all
works of the Romantic Movement is closest to our present interest. In the pastness of these works lies the assurance of their
validity and relevance.
The question is always arising: What is the real poem? Is it
the poem we now perceive? Is it the poem the author consciously intended? Is it the poem the author intended and his
first readers read? Well, it is all these things, depending on the
state of our knowledge. But in addition the poem is the poem
as it has existed in history, as it has lived its life from Then
to Now, as it is a thing which submits itself to one kind of perception in one age and another kind of perception in another
age, as it exerts in each age a different kind of power. This
makes it a thing we can never wholly understand other
things too, of course, help to make it that and the mystery,
The Sense of the Past 187
the unreachable part of the poem, Is one of its aesthetic elements.
To suppose that we can think like men of another time is as
much of an illusion as to suppose that we can think in a wholly
different way. But it is the first illusion that is exemplified in
the attitude of the anti-historical critics. In the admirable
poetry textbook of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren,
the authors disclaim all historical intention. Their purpose
being what it is, they are right to do so, but I wonder if they
are right in never asking in their aesthetic analysis the question: What effect is created by our knowledge that the language of a particular poem is not such as would be uttered by
a poet writing now? To read a poem of even a hundred years
ago requires as much translation of its historical circumstance
as of its metaphors. This the trained and gifted critic is likely
to forget; his own historical sense is often so deeply ingrained
that he is not wholly conscious of it, and sometimes, for rea-
sons of his own, he prefers to keep it merely implicit. Yet
whether or not it is made conscious and explicit, the historical sense is one of the aesthetic and critical faculties.
What more apposite reminder of this can we have than
the early impulse of the New Critics themselves to discover
all poetic virtue in the poetry of the seventeenth century, the
impulse, only lately modified, to find the essence of poetic
error in the poetry of Romanticism? Their having given rein
to this impulse is certainly not illegitimate. They were doing
what we all do, what w r e all must and even should do: they
were involving their aesthetics with certain cultural preferences, they were implying choices in religion, metaphysics,
politics, manners. And in so far as they were doing this by
showing a preference for a particular period of the past, which
they brought into comparison with the present, they were
exercising their historical sense. We cannot question their
preference itself; we can only question the mere implicitness
188 The Liberal Imagination
of their historical sense, their attitude of making the historical
sense irrelevant to their aesthetic.
But if the historical sense is always with us, it must, for
just that reason, be refined and made more exact. We have,
that is, to open our minds to the whole question of what we
mean when we speak of causation in culture. Hume, who so
shook our notions of causation in the physical sciences, raises
some interesting questions of causation in culture. ''There is
no subject/' he says, "in which we must proceed with more
caution than in tracing the history of the arts and sciences;
lest we assign causes which never existed and reduce what
is merely contingent to stable and universal principles/' The
cultivators of the arts, he goes on to say, are always few in
number and their minds are delicate and "easily perverted."
* 4 Chance, therefore, or secret and unknown causes must have
great influence on the rise and progress of all refined arts/'
But there is one fact, he continues, which gives us the license
to speculate this is the fact that the choice spirits arise from
and are related to the mass of the people of their time. "The
question, therefore, is not altogether concerning the taste,
genius, and spirit of a few, but concerning those of a whole
people; and may, therefore, be accounted for, in some measure,
by general causes and principles." This gives us our charter
to engage in cultural history and cultural criticism, but we
must see that it is a charter to deal with a mystery.
The refinement of our historical sense chiefly means that
we keep it properly complicated. History, like science and
art, involves abstraction: we abstract certain events from
others and we make this particular abstraction with an end in
view, we make it to serve some purpose of our will. Try as
we may, we cannot, as we write history, escape our purposiveness. Nor, indeed, should we try to escape, for purpose and
meaning are the same thing. But in pursuing our purpose, in
making our abstractions, we must be aware of what we are
doing; we ought to have it fully in mind that our abstraction
The Sense of the Past 189
is not perfectly equivalent to the infinite complication of
events from which we have abstracted. I should like to suggest a few ways in which those of us who are literary scholars
can give to our notion of history an appropriate complication.
It ought to be for us a real question whether, and in what
way, human nature is always the same. I do not mean that we
ought to settle this question before we get to w T ork, but only
that we insist to ourselves that the question is a real one. What
we certainly know has changed is the expression of human
nature, and we must keep before our minds the problem of
the relation which expression bears to feeling. E. E. Stoll, the
well-known Shakespearean critic, has settled the matter out
of hand by announcing the essential difference between what
he calls "convention" and w T hat he calls "life," and he insists
that the two may have no truck with each other, that we cannot say of Shakespeare that he is psychologically or philosophically acute because these are terms w r e use of 'life,"
whereas Shakespeare was dealing only with "convention."
This has the virtue of suggesting how important is the relation of "convention" to "life," but it misses the point that
"life" is always expressed through "convention" and in a
sense always is "convention," and that convention has meaning only because of the intentions of life. Professor Stoll
seems to go on the assumption that Shakespeare's audiences
were conscious of convention; they were aware of it, but certainly not conscious of it; what they w r ere conscious of was
life, into which they made an instantaneous translation of all
that took place on the stage. The problem of the interplay between the emotion and the convention which is available for it,
and the reciprocal influence they exert on each other, is a very
difficult one, and I scarcely even state its complexities, let
alone pretend to solve them. But the problem with its diffi-
culties should be admitted, and simplicity of solution should
always be regarded as a sign of failure.
igo The Liberal Imagination
A very important step forward in the complication o our
sense of the past was made when Whitehead and after him
Lovejoy taught us to look not for the expressed but for the
assumed ideas of an age, what Whitehead describes as the
"assumptions which appear so obvious that people do not
know that they are assuming them because no other way of
putting things has ever occurred to them/*
But a regression was made when Professor Lovejoy, in that
influential book of his, assured us that "the ideas in serious
reflective literature are, of course, in great part philosophical
ideas in dilution." To go fully into the error of this common belief would need more time than we have now at our
disposal. It is part of our suspiciousness of literature that we
undertake thus to make it a dependent art. Certainly we must
question the assumption which gives the priority in ideas to
the philosopher and sees the movement of thought as always
from the systematic thinker, who thinks up the ideas in, presumably, a cultural vacuum, to the poet who "uses" the ideas
"in dilution." We must question this even if it means a reconstruction of what we mean by "ideas."
And this leads to another matter about which we may not
be simple, the relation of the poet to his environment. The
poet, it is true, is an effect of environment, but we must remember that he is no less a cause. He may be used as the
barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the
weather. We have been too easily satisfied by a merely elementary meaning of environment; we have been content with
a simple quantitative implication of the word, taking a large
and literally environing thing to be always the environment
of a smaller thing. In a concert room the audience and its attitude are of course the environment of the performer, but
also the performer and his music make the environment of
the audience. In a family the parents are no doubt the chief
factors in the environment of the child; but also the child is a
The Sense of the Past 191
factor in the environment of the parents and himself conditions the actions of his parents toward him.
Corollary to this question of environment is the question
of influence, the influence which one writer is said to have
had on another. In its historical meaning, from which we
take our present use, influence was a word intended to express a mystery. It means a flowing-in, but not as a tributary
river flows into the main stream at a certain observable point;
historically the image is an astrological one and the meanings
which the Oxford Dictionary gives all suggest "producing
effects by insensible or invisible means" "the infusion of
any kind of divine, spiritual, moral, immaterial, or secret
power or principle." Before the idea of influence we ought
to be far more puzzled than we are; if w^e find it hard to be
puzzled enough, we may contrive to induce the proper state
of uncertainty by turning the word upon ourselves, asking,
"What have been the influences that made me the person I
am, and to whom would I entrust the task o truly discovering
what they were?"
Yet another thing that we have not understood with sufficient complication is the nature of ideas in their relation to
the conditions of their development and in relation to their
transmission. Too often we conceive of an Idea as being like
the baton that is handed from runner to runner in a relay race.
But an idea as a transmissible thing is rather like the sentence
that in the parlor game is whispered about in a circle; the
point of the game is the amusement that comes when the last
version is compared with the original. As for the origin of
ideas, we ought to remember that an idea is the formulation
of a response to a situation; so, too, is the modification of an
existing idea. Since the situations in which people or cultures find themselves are limited in number, and since the
possible responses are also limited, ideas certainly do have a
tendency to recur, and because people think habitually ideas
The Liberal Imagination
also have a tendency to persist when the situation which called
them forth is no longer present; so that ideas do have a certain limited autonomy, and sometimes the appearance of a
complete autonomy. From this there has grown up the belief in the actual perfect autonomy of ideas. It is supposed
that ideas think themselves, create themselves and their descendants, have a life independent of the thinker and the
situation. And from this we are often led to conclude that
ideas, systematic ideas, are directly responsible for events.
A similar feeling is prevalent among our intellectual classes
in relation to words. Semantics is not now the lively concern
that it was a few years ago, but the mythology of what we may
call political semantics has become established in our intellectual life, the belief that we are betrayed by words, that
words push us around against our will. "The tyranny of
words" became a popular phrase and is still in use, and the
sernanticists offer us an easier world and freedom from war if
only we assert our independence from words. But nearly a
century ago Dickens said that he was tired of hearing about
"the tyranny of words" (he used that phrase); he was, he said,
less concerned with the way words abuse us than with the way
we abuse words. It is not words that make our troubles, but
our own wills. Words cannot control us unless we desire to be
controlled by them. And the same is true of the control of
systematic ideas. We have come to believe that some ideas can
betray us, others save us. The educated classes are learning to
blame ideas for our troubles, rather than blaming what is a
very different thing our own bad thinking. This is the great
vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather
than with thinking, and nowadays the errors of academicism
do not stay in the academy; they make their way into the
world, and what begins as a failure of perception among intellectual specialists finds its fulfillment in policy and action.
In time of war, when two different cultures, or two extreme modifications of the same culture, confront each other
The Sense of the Past 193
with force, this belief in the autonomy of ideas becomes especially strong and therefore especially clear. In any modern
war there is likely to be involved a conflict of ideas which is
in part factitious but which is largely genuine. But this conflict of ideas, genuine as it may be, suggests to both sides
the necessity of believing in the fixed, immutable nature of the
ideas to which each side owes allegiance. What gods were to the
ancients at war, ideas are to us. Thus, in the last war, an eminent American professor of philosophy won wide praise for
demonstrating that Nazism was to be understood as the in-
evitable outcome of the ideas of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,
while the virtues of American democracy were to be explained
by tracing a direct line of descent from Plato and the Athenian polity. Or consider a few sentences from a biography
of Byron, written when, not so long ago, the culture of
Nazism was at its height. The author, a truly admirable English biographer, is making an estimate of the effort of the Romantic Movement upon our time. He concludes that the
Romantic Movement failed. Well, we have all heard that before, and perhaps it is true, although I for one know less and
less what it means. Indeed, I know less and less what is meant
by the ascription of failure to any movement in literature.
All movements fail, and perhaps the Romantic Movement
failed more than most because it attempted more than most;
possibly it attempted too much. To say that a literary movement failed seems to suggest a peculiar view of both literature and history; it implies that literature ought to settle
something for good and all, that life ought to be progressively
completed. But according to our author, not only did the Romantic Movement fail it left a terrible legacy:
Nationalism was essentially a Romantic movement, and from nationalism springs the half-baked racial theorist with his romantic
belief in the superiority of " Aryan" blood and his romantic distrust of the use of reason. So far-reaching were the effects of the
Romantic Revival that they still persist in shapes under which
The Liberal Imagination
they are no longer recognized. . . . For Romantic literature appeals to that strain of anarchism which inhabits a dark corner of
every human mind and is continually advancing the charms of extinction against the claims of life the beauty of all that is fragmentary and youthful and half-formed as opposed to the compact
achievement of adult genius.
It is of course easy enough to reduce the argument to absurdity we have only to ask why Germany and not ourselves responded so fiercely to the romantic ideas which, if
they be indeed the romantic ideas, were certainly available
to everybody. The failure of logic is not however what concerns us, but rather what the logic is intended to serve: the
belief that ideas generate events, that they have an autonomous existence, and that they can seize upon the minds of
some men and control their actions independently of circumstance and will.
Needless to say, these violations of historical principle require a violation of historical fact. The Schopenhauer and
the Nietzsche of the first explanation have no real reference
to two nineteenth-century philosophers of the same names;
the Plato is imaginary, the Athens out of a storybook, and no
attempt is made to reconcile this fanciful Athens with the
opinion of the real Athens held by the real Plato. As for the
second explanation, how are w r e to connect anarchism, and
hostility to the claims of life, and the fragmentary, and the
immature, and the half-formed, with Kant, or Goethe, or
Wordsworth, or Beethoven, or Berlioz, or Delacroix? And.
how from these men, who are Romanticism, dare we derive
the iron rigidity and the desperate centralization which the
New Order of the Nazis involved, or the systematic cruelty or
the elaborate scientism with which the racial doctrine was
implicated?
The two books to which I refer are of course in themselves
harmless and I don't wish to put upon them a weight which
they should not properly be made to bear. But they do sug-
The Sense of the Past 195
gest something of the low estate into which history has fallen
among our educated classes, and they are of a piece with the
depreciation of the claims of history which a good many literary people nowadays make, a depreciation which has had
the effect of leading young students of literature, particularly
the more gifted ones, to incline more and more to resist historical considerations, justifying themselves, as it is natural
they should, by pointing to the dullness and deadness and
falsifications which have resulted from the historical study of
literature. Our resistance to history is no doubt ultimately
to be accounted for by nothing less than the whole nature of
our life today. It was said by Nietzsche the real one, not
the lay figure of cultural propaganda that the historical
sense was an actual faculty of the mind, "a sixth sense/' and
that the credit for the recognition of its status must go to the
nineteenth century. What was uniquely esteemed by the nineteenth century is not likely to stand in high favor with us:
our coldness to historical thought may in part be explained
by our feeling that it is precisely the past that caused all our
troubles, the nineteenth century being the most blameworthy
of all the culpable centuries. Karl Marx, for whom history
was indeed a sixth sense, expressed what has come to be the
secret hope of our time, that man's life in politics, which is to
say, man's life in history, shall come to an end. History, as
we now understand it, envisions its own extinction that is
really what we nowadays mean by "progress" and with all
the passion of a desire kept secret even from ourselves, we
yearn to elect a way of life which shall be satisfactory once
and for all, time without end, and we do not want to be reminded by the past of the considerable possibility that our
present is but perpetuating mistakes and failures and instituting new troubles.
And yet, when we come to think about it, the chances are
all in favor of our having to go on making our choices and
so of making our mistakes. History, in its meaning of a con-
ig6 The Liberal Imagination
tlnimm of events, is not really likely to come to an end. There
may therefore be some value in bringing explicitly to mind
what part in culture is played by history in its other meanino" of an ordering and understanding of the continuum of
events. There is no one who is better able to inform us on
this point than Nietzsche. We can perhaps listen to him with
the more patience because he himself would have had considerable sympathy for our impatience with history, for although he thought that the historical sense brought certain
virtues, making men "unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave,
habituated to self-control and self-renunciation," he also
thought that it prevented them from having the ability to
respond to the very highest and noblest developments of culture, making them suspicious of what is wholly completed
and fully matured. This ambivalent view of the historical
sense gives him a certain authority when he defines what the
historical sense is and does. It is, he said, "the capacity for
divining quickly the order of the rank of the valuation according to which a people, a community, or an individual has
lived." In the case of a people or of a community, the valuations are those which are expressed not only by the gross
institutional facts of their life, what Nietzsche called "the
operating forces," but also and more significantly by their
morals and manners, by their philosophy and art. And the
historical sense, he goes on to say, is "the 'divining instinct*
for the relationships of these valuations, for the relation of
the valuations to the operating forces." The historical sense,
that is, is to be understood as the critical sense, as the sense
which life uses to test itself. And since there never was a time
when the instinct for divining and "quickly"! the order
of rank of cultural expressions was so much needed, our growing estrangement from history must be understood as the
sign of our desperation.
Nietzsche's own capacity for quickly divining the order of
rank of cultural things was, when he was at his best, more
The Sense of the Past 197
acute than that of any other man of his time or since. If we
look for the explanation of his acuity, we find it in the fact
that it never occurred to him to separate his historical sense
from his sense of art. They were not two senses but one. And
the merit of his definition of the historical sense, especially
when it is taken in conjunction with the example of himself,
is that it speaks to the historian and to the student of art as
if they were one person. To that person Nietzsche's definition prescribes that culture be studied and judged as life's
continuous evaluation of itself, the evaluation being understood as never finding full expression in the "operating forces"
of a culture, but as never finding expression at all without
reference to these gross, institutional facts.
Tacitus Now
The histories of Tacitus have been put to strange uses. The
princelings of Renaissance Italy consulted the Annals on how
to behave with the duplicity of Tiberius. The German racists
overlooked all the disagreeable things which Tacitus observed
of their ancestors, took note only of his praise of the ancient
chastity and independence, and thus made of the Germania
their anthropological primer. But these are the aberrations;
the influence of Tacitus in Europe has been mainly in the
service of liberty, as he intended it to be. Perhaps this influence has been most fully felt in France, where, under the
dictatorships both of the Jacobins and of Napoleon, Tacitus
was regarded as a dangerously subversive writer. In America,
however, he has never meant a great deal. James Fenimore
Cooper is an impressive exception to our general indifference, but Cooper was temperamentally attracted by the very
one of all the qualities of Tacitus which is likely to alienate
most American liberals, the aristocratic color of his libertarian ideas. Another reason for our coolness to Tacitus is that,
until recently, our political experience gave us no ground to
understand what he is talking about. Dictatorship and repression, spies and political informers, blood purges and treacherous dissension have not been part of our political tradition
as they have been of Europe's. But Europe has now come very
close to us, and our political education of the last decades fits
us to understand the historian of imperial Rome.
It is the mark of a great history that sooner or later we be-
198
Tacitus Now igg
come as much aware of the historian as of the events he relates.
In reading Tacitus we are aware of him from the first page:
we are aware of him as one of the few great writers who are
utterly without hope. He is always conscious of his own despair; it is nearly a fault in him; the attitude sometimes verges
on attitudinizing. Yet the great fact about Tacitus is that he
never imposes or wishes to impose his despair upon the reader.
He must, he says, be always telling of "the merciless biddings of a tyrant, incessant prosecution, faithless friendships,
the ruin of innocence, the same causes issuing in the same
results," and he complains of "the wearisome monotony" of
his subject matter. But the reader never feels the monotony;
despite the statements which seem to imply the contrary,
Tacitus never becomes the victim of what he writes about
he had too much power of mind for that.
His power of mind is not like that of Thucydides; it is not
really political and certainly not military. It is, on a grand
scale, psychological. We are irresistibly reminded of Proust
when Tacitus sets about creating the wonderful figure of
Tiberius and, using a hundred uncertainties and contradictions, tries to solve this great enigma of a man, yet always
avoids the solution because the enigma is the character. In
writing of political events his real interest is not in their
political meaning but rather in what we would now call their
cultural meaning, in what they tell us of the morale and
morals of the nation; it is an interest that may profitably be
compared with Flaubert's in U Education Sentimentale, and
perhaps it has been remarked that that novel, and Salammbo
as well, have elements of style and emotion which reinforce
our sense of Flaubert as a Tacitean personality.
Tacitus's conception of history was avow T edly personal and
moral. "This I regard as history's highest function/' he says,
"to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold
out the reprobation of posterity to evil words and deeds."
This moral preoccupation finds expression in a moral sensi-
200 The Liberal Imagination
billty which Is not ours and which in many respects we find
it hard to understand. It has often been pointed out that
slaves, Christians, Jews, and barbarians are outside the circle of his sympathies; he rather despised the Stoic humanitarianism of Seneca. Yet, as he says, half his historical interest
is in the discovery of good deeds, and perhaps nothing in
literature has a greater impact of astonishment, a more sudden sense of illumination, than the occurrence of a good deed
in the pages of his histories. He represents the fabric of society
as so loosened that we can scarcely credit the account of any
simple human relationship, let alone a noble action. Yet the
simple human relationships exist a soldier weeps at having
killed his brother in the civil war, the aristocrats open their
houses to the injured thousands when the great amphitheater falls down; and the noble actions take place the freedwoman Epicharis, when Piso's enormous conspiracy against
Nero was discovered, endured the torture and died, implicating no one, ' 'screening strangers and those whom she hardly
knew/' But the human relationship and the noble deed exist in
the midst of depravity and disloyalty so great that we are always surprised by the goodness before we are relieved by it;
what makes the fortitude of Epicharis so remarkable and so
puzzling is that the former slave screened strangers and those
whom she hardly knew "when freeborn men, Roman knights
and senators, yet unscathed by the torture, betrayed, every
one, his dearest kinsfolk." From these pages we learn really
to understand those well-worn lines of Portia's about the
beam of the candle, for we discover what Portia meant by a
naughty world, literally a world of naught, a moral vacancy
so great and black that in it the beam of a candle seems a
flash of lightning.
The moral and psychological interests of Tacitus are developed at the cost of what nowadays is believed to be the
true historical insight. The French scholar Boissier remarks
that it is impossible to read the History and the Annals with-
Tacitus Now 201
out wondering how the Roman Empire could possibly have
held together through the eighty years o mutiny, infamy,
intrigue, riot, expenditure, and irresponsibility which the
two books tell us of. At any moment, we think, the political
structure must collapse under this unnatural weight. Yet almost any modern account of the post-Augustan Empire suggests that we are wrong to make this supposition and seems to
imply a radical criticism of Tacitus's methods. Breasted, for
example, includes the period from Tiberius to Vespasian in a
chapter which he calls "The First of Two Centuries of Peace,"
And Rostovtzeff in his authoritative work gives us to understand that Rome, despite the usual minor troubles, was a
healthy, developing society. Yet Tacitus finds it worthy of
comment that at this time a certain man died a natural death
"a rare incident in so high a rank,'* he says.
It is not, as I gather, that Tacitus lacks veracity. What he
lacks is what in the thirties used to be called "the long view"
of history. But to minds of a certain sensitivity "the long
view" is the falsest historical view of all, and indeed the insistence on the length of perspective is intended precisely to
overcome sensitivity seen from sufficient distance, it says,
the corpse and the hacked limbs are not so very terrible, and
eventually they even begin to compose themselves into a
"meaningful pattern." Tacitus had no notions of historical
development to comfort him; nor did he feel it his duty to
look at present danger and pain with the remote, objective
eyes of posterity. The knowledge, if he had it, that trade with
the East was growing or that a more efficient bureaucracy was
evolving by which well-trained freedmen might smoothly administer affairs at home and in the provinces could not
have consoled him for what he saw as the degradation of his
class and nation. He wrote out of his feelings of the present
and did not conceive the consolations of history and the future.
What for many modern scholars is the vice of history was
202 The Liberal Imagination
for Tacitus its virtue he thought that history should be
literature and that it should move the minds of men through
their feelings. And so he contrived his narrative with the most
elaborate attention to its dramatic effects. Yet something
more than a scrupulous concern for literary form makes
Tacitus so impressive in a literary way; some essential poise
of his mind allowed him to see events with both passion and
objectivity, and one cannot help wondering if the bitter division which his mind had to endure did not reinforce this
quality. For Tacitus hated the Rome of the emperors, all his
feelings being for the vanished republic; yet for the return
of the republic he had no hope whatever. "It is easy to commend/' he said, "but not to produce; or if it is produced, it
cannot be lasting." He served the ideal of the republic in
his character of historian; the actuality of the empire he
served as praetor, consul, and proconsul, and complied with
the wishes of the hated Domitian. The more he saw of the
actuality, the more he despaired of his ideal and the more
he loved it. And perhaps this secret tension of love and despair
accounts for the poise and energy of his intellect.
We can see this poise and energy in almost all his judgments. For example, he despised the Jews, but he would not
repress his wry appreciation of their stubborn courage and
his intense admiration for their conception of God. The one
phrase of his that everyone knows, "They make a solitude and
call it peace/' he put into the mouth of a British barbarian,
the leader of a revolt against Roman rule; it will always be
the hostile characterization of imperialist domination, yet
Tacitus himself measured Roman virtue by imperialist success. He makes no less than four successive judgments of
Otho: scorns him as Nero's courtier and cuckold, admires him
as a provincial governor, despises him as emperor, and praises
him for choosing to die and end the civil war. Much as he
loved the republican character, he knew that its day was past,
Tacitus Now 203
and he ascribes Galba's fall to his old-fashioned inflexibility
in republican virtue.
The poise and energy of Tacitus's mind manifests itself in
his language, and Professor Hadas in his admirable introduction to the useful Modern Library edition tells us how much
we must lose in translation. Yet even a reader of the translation cannot help being aware of the power of the writing.
When Tacitus remarks that Tiberius was an emperor "who
feared freedom while he hated sycophancy" or that the name
of Lucius Volusius was made glorious by his ninety-three
years, his honorable wealth, and his "wide avoidance of the
malignity of so many emperors" or that "perhaps a sense of
weariness steals over princes when they have bestowed everything, or over favorites when there is nothing left to them to
desire/' we catch a glimpse of the force of the original because
the thought itself is so inherently dramatic. Sometimes we
wonder, no doubt foolishly, if we really need the original, so
striking is the effect in translation, as when Sabinus is being
led to his death through the streets and the people flee from
his glance, fearing that it will implicate them: "Wherever he
turned, wherever his eyes fell, there was flight and solitude";
or when the soldiers undertake to "absolve" themselves of a
mutiny by the ferocity with which they slaughter their leaders; or when, in that greatest of street scenes, the debauchees
look out of their brothel doors to observe with casual interest
the armies fighting for the possession of Rome.
Tacitus is not a tragic writer as, in some strict use of the
word, Thucydides is often said to be. It has been conjectured
of Thucydides that he conceived his Peloponnesian War on
the model of actual tragic drama, Athens being his hero; and
certainly the downfall of Athens, which Thucydides himself
witnessed, makes a fable with the typical significance of tragedy. But Tacitus had no such matter for his histories. The
republic had died before his grandfather was born and he
204 The Liberal Imagination
looked back at it through a haze of idealization the tragedy
had ended long ago; what he observed was the aftermath
which had no end, which exactly lacked the coherence of
tragedy. His subject is not Rome at all, not Rome the political
entity, but rather the grotesque career of the human spirit
in a society which, if we may summarize the whole tendency
of his thought, appeared to him to endure for no other purpose than to maintain the long and lively existence of anarchy.
From this it is easy, and all too easy, to discover his relevance
to us now, but the relevance does not account for the strange
invigoration of his pages, which is rather to be explained by
his power of mind and his stubborn love of virtue maintained
in desperate circumstances.
Manners, Morals., and the Novel
The invitation that was made to me to address you this evening was couched in somewhat uncertain terms. Time, place,
and cordiality were perfectly clear, but when it came to the
subject our hosts were not able to specify just what they
wanted me to talk about. They wanted me to consider litera-
ture in its relation to manners by which, as they relied on
me to understand, they did not really mean manners. They
did not mean, that is, the rules of personal intercourse in our
culture; and yet such rules were by no means irrelevant to
what they did mean. Nor did they quite mean manners in the
sense of mores, customs, although, again, these did bear upon
the subject they had in mind.
I understood them perfectly, as I would not have understood them had they been more definite. For they were talking about a nearly indexable subject.
Somewhere below all the explicit statements that a people
makes through its art, religion, architecture, legislation, there
is a dim mental region of intention of which it is very difficult to become aware. We now and then get a strong sense of
its existence when we deal with the past, not by reason of its
presence in the past but by reason of its absence. As we read
the great formulated monuments of the past, we notice that
we are reading them without the accompaniment of some-
No te: This essay was read at the Conference on the Heritage of the
Englishspeaking Peoples and Their Responsibilities, at Kenyon College,
September
1 947-
205
206 The Liberal Imagination
thing that always goes along with the formulated monuments
of the present. The voice of multifarious intention and activity is stilled, all the buzz of implication which always surrounds us in the present, coming to us from what never gets
fully stated, coming in the tone of greetings and the tone of
quarrels, in slang and humor and popular songs, in the way
children play, in the gesture the waiter makes when he puts
down the plate, in the nature of the very food we prefer.
Some of the charm of the past consists of the quiet the
great distracting buzz of implication has stopped and we are
left only with what has been fully phrased and precisely
stated. And part of the melancholy of the past comes from
our knowledge that the huge, unrecorded hum of implication was once there and left no trace we feel that because
it is evanescent it is especially human. We feel, too, that the
truth of the great preserved monuments of the past does not
fully appear without it. From letters and diaries, from the
remote, unconscious corners of the great works themselves,
we try to guess what the sound of the multifarious implication was and what it meant.
Or when we read the conclusions that are drawn about
our own culture by some gifted foreign critic or by some
stupid native one who is equipped only with a knowledge
of our books, when we try in vain to say what is wrong, when
In despair we say that he has read the books "out of context,"
then we are aware of the matter I have been asked to speak
about tonight.
What I understand by manners, then, is a culture's hum
and buzz of implication. I mean the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made. It is that part
of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unuttered
or unutterable expressions of value. They are hinted at by
small actions, sometimes by the arts of dress or decoration,
sometimes by tone, gesture, emphasis, or rhythm, sometimes
by the words that are used with a special frequency or a special
Manners^ M orals , and the Novel 207
meaning. They are the things that for good or bad draw the
people of a culture together and that separate them from
the people of another culture. They make the part of a culture
which is not art, or religion, or morals, or politics, and yet it
relates to all these highly formulated departments of culture. It is modified by them; it modifies them; it is generated
by them; it generates them. In this part of culture assumption rules, which is often so much stronger than reason.
The right way to begin to deal with such a subject is to
gather together as much of its detail as we possibly can. Only
by doing so will we become fully aware of what the gifted,
foreign critic or the stupid native one is not aware of, that
in any complex culture there is not a single system of manners
but a conflicting variety of manners, and that one of the jobs,
of a culture is the adjustment of this conflict.
But the nature of our present occasion does not permit
this accumulation of detail and so I shall instead try to drive
toward a generalization and an hypothesis which, however
wrong they turn out to be, may at least permit us to circumscribe the subject. I shall try to generalize the subject of
American manners by talking about the attitude of Americans,
toward the subject of manners itself. And since in a com-
plex culture there are, as I say, many different systems of
manners and since I cannot talk about them all, I shall select
the manners and the attitude toward manners of the literate,
reading, responsible middle class of people who are ourselves.
I specify that they be reading people because I shall draw my
conclusions from the novels they read. The hypothesis I
propose is that our attitude toward manners is the expression of a particular conception of reality.
All literature tends to be concerned with the question of
reality I mean quite simply the old opposition between
reality and appearance, between what really is and what
merely seems. "Don't you see?" is the question we want tt>
shout at Oedipus as he stands before us and before fate in the
so8 The Liberal Imagination
pride of his rationalism. And at the end of Oedipus Rex he
demonstrates in a particularly direct way that he now sees
what he did not see before. "Don't you see?" we want to
shout again at Lear and Gloucester, the two deceived, selfdeceiving fathers: blindness again, resistance to the clear
claims of reality, the seduction by mere appearance. The same
with Othello reality is right under your stupid nose, how
dare you be such a gull? So with Moliere's Orgon my good
man, my honest citizen, merely look at Tartuffe and you will
know what's what. So with Milton's Eve "Woman, watch
out! Don't you see anyone can see that's a snake!"
The problem of reality is central, and in a special way, to
the great forefather of the novel, the great book of Cervantes,
whose four-hundredth birthday was celebrated in 1947. There
are two movements of thought in Don Quixote, two different
and opposed notions of reality. One is the movement which
leads toward saying that the world of ordinary practicality is
reality in its fullness. It is the reality of the present moment in
all its powerful immediacy of hunger, cold, and pain, making the past and the future, and all ideas, of no account. When
the conceptual, the ideal, and the fanciful come into conflict with this, bringing their notions of the past and the
future, then disaster results. For one thing, the ordinary
proper ways of life are upset the chained prisoners are understood to be good men and are released, the whore is taken
for a lady. There is general confusion. As for the ideal, the
conceptual, the fanciful, or romantic whatever you want to
call it it fares even worse: it is shown to be ridiculous.
Thus one movement of the novel. But Cervantes changed
horses in midstream and found that he was riding Rosinante.
Perhaps at first not quite consciously although the new view
is latent in the old from the very beginning Cervantes begins to show that the world of tangible reality is not the real
reality after all. The real reality is rather the wildly conceiving, the madly fantasying mind of the Don: people change,
Manners, Morals, and the Novel 209
practical reality changes, when they come into its presence.
In any genre it may happen that the first great example contains the whole potentiality of the genre. It has been said that
all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all
prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.
Cervantes sets for the novel the problem of appearance and
reality: the shifting and conflict of social classes becomes the
field of the problem of knowledge, of how we know and of
how reliable our knowledge is, which at that very moment of
history is vexing the philosophers and scientists. And the
poverty of the Don suggests that the novel is born with the
appearance of money as a social element money, the great
solvent of the solid fabric of the old society, the great generator of illusion. Or, which is to say much the same thing, the
novel is born in response to snobbery.
Snobbery is not the same thing as pride of class. Pride of
class may not please us but we must at least grant that it re-
flects a social function. A man who exhibited class pride in
the day when it was possible to do so may have been puffed
up about what he was, but this ultimately depended on what
he did. Thus, aristocratic pride was based ultimately on the
ability to fight and administer. No pride is without fault, but
pride of class may be thought of as today we think of pride
of profession, toward which we are likely to be lenient.
Snobbery is pride in status without pride in function. And
it is an uneasy pride of status. It always asks, "Do I belong
do I really belong? And does he belong? And if I am observed
talking to him, will it make me seem to belong or not to belong?" It is the peculiar vice not of aristocratic societies which
have their own appropriate vices, but of bourgeois democratic societies. For us the legendary strongholds of snobbery
are the Hollywood studios, where two thousand dollars a week
dare not talk to three hundred dollars a week for fear he be
taken for nothing more than fifteen hundred dollars a week.
The dominant emotions of snobbery are uneasiness, self-
210 The Liberal Imagination
consciousness, self-defensiveness, the sense that one is not
quite real but can in some way acquire reality.
Money is the medium that, for good or bad, makes for a
fluent society. It does not make for an equal society but for
one in which there is a constant shifting of classes, a frequent
change in the personnel of the dominant class. In a shifting
society great emphasis is put on appearance I am using the
word now in the common meaning, as when people say that
"a good appearance is very important in getting a job." To
appear to be established is one of the ways of becoming established. The old notion of the solid merchant who owns
far more than he shows increasingly gives way to the ideal of
signalizing status by appearance, by showing more than you
have: status in a democratic society is presumed to come not
with power but w r ith the tokens of power. Hence the development of what Tocqueville saw as a mark of democratic culture, what he called the "hypocrisy of luxury" instead of
the well-made peasant article and the well-made middle-class
article, we have the effort of all articles to appear as the
articles of the very wealthy.
And a shifting society is bound to generate an interest in
appearance in the philosophical sense. When Shakespeare
lightly touched on the matter that so largely preoccupies the
novelist that is, the movement from one class to another
and created Malvolio, he immediately involved the question
of social standing with the problem of appearance and reality. Malvolio's daydreams of bettering his position present
themselves to him as reality, and in revenge his enemies conspire to convince him that he is literally mad and that the
world is not as he sees it. The predicament of the characters
in A Midsummer Night's Dream and of Christopher Sly
seems to imply that the meeting of social extremes and the
establishment of a person of low class in the privileges of a
high class always suggested to Shakespeare's mind some radical instability of the senses and the reason.
Manners, Morals, and the Novel 211
The characteristic work of the novel is to record the illusion that snobbery generates and to try to penetrate to the
truth which, as the novel assumes, lies hidden beneath all
the false appearances. Money, snobbery, the ideal of status,
these become in themselves the objects of fantasy, the support of the fantasies of love, freedom, charm, power, as in
Madame Bovary, whose heroine is the sister, at a threecenturies' remove, of Don Quixote. The greatness of Great
Expectations begins in its title: modern society bases itself
on great expectations which, if ever they are realized, are
found to exist by reason of a sordid, hidden reality. The real
thing is not the gentility of Pip's life but the hulks and the
murder and the rats and decay in the cellarage of the novel.
An English writer, recognizing the novel's central concern
with snobbery, recently cried out half-ironically against it.
"Who cares whether Pamela finally exasperates Mr. B. into
marriage, whether Mr. Elton is more or less than moderately
genteel, whether it is sinful for Pendennis nearly to kiss the
porter's daughter, whether young men from Boston can ever
be as truly refined as middle-aged women in Paris, whether
the District Officer's fiancee ought to see so much of Dr. Aziz,
whether Lady Chatterley ought to be made love to by the
gamekeeper, even if he was an officer during the war? Who
cares?"
The novel, of course, tells us much more about life than
this. It tells us about the look and feel of things, how things
are done and what things are worth and what they cost and
what the odds are. If the English novel in its special concern
with class does not, as the same writer says, explore the deeper
layers of personality, then the French novel in exploring these
layers must start and end in class, and the Russian novel, ex-
ploring the ultimate possibilities of spirit, does the same
every situation in Dostoevski, no matter how spiritual, starts
with a point of social pride and a certain number of rubles.
The great novelists knew that manners indicate the largest
212 The Liberal Imagination
Intentions of men's souls as well as the smallest and they are
perpetually concerned to catch the meaning o every dim implicit hint.
The novel, then, is a perpetual quest for reality, the field of
its research being always the social world, the material of its
analysis being always manners as the indication of the direction of man's soul. When we understand this we can understand the pride of profession that moved D. H. Lawrence to
say, "Being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint,
the scientist, the philosopher and the poet. The novel is the
one bright book of life."
Now the novel as I have described it has never really established itself in America. Not that we have not had very
great novels but that the novel in America diverges from its
classic intention, which, as I have said, is the investigation
of the problem of reality beginning in the social field. The
fact is that American writers of genius have not turned their
minds to society. Poe and Melville were quite apart from it;
the reality they sought was only tangential to society. Hawthorne was acute when he insisted that he did not write novels
but romances he thus expressed his awareness of the lack of
social texture in his work. Howells never fulfilled himself
because, although he saw the social subject clearly, he would
never take it with full seriousness. In America in the nineteenth century, Henry James was alone in knowing that to
scale the moral and aesthetic heights in the novel one had to
use the ladder of social observation.
There is a famous passage in James's life of Hawthorne in
which James enumerates the things which are lacking to give
the American novel the thick social texture of the English
novel no state; barely a specific national name; no sovereign;
no court; no aristocracy; no church; no clergy; no army; no
diplomatic service; no country gentlemen; no palaces; no
castles; no manors; no old country houses; no parsonages;
Manners, Morals, and the Novel
no thatched cottages; no ivied ruins; no cathedrals; no great
universities; no public schools; no political society; no sporting
class no Epsom, no Ascot! That is, no sufficiency of means
for the display of a variety of manners, no opportunity for the
novelist to do his job of searching out reality, not enough complication of appearance to make the job interesting. Another
great American novelist of very different temperament had said
much the same thing some decades before: James Fenimore
Cooper found that American manners were too simple and
dull to nourish the novelist.
This is cogent but it does not explain the condition of the
American novel at the present moment. For life in America has
increasingly thickened since the nineteenth century. It has not,
to be sure, thickened so much as to permit our undergraduates
to understand the characters of Balzac, to understand, that is,
life in a crowded country where the competitive pressures are
great, forcing intense passions to express themselves fiercely
and yet within the limitations set by a strong and complicated
tradition of manners. Still, life here has become more complex and more pressing. And even so we do not have the novel
that touches significantly on society, on manners. Whatever
the virtues of Dreiser may be, he could not report the social
fact with the kind of accuracy it needs. Sinclair Lewis is
shrewd, but no one, however charmed with him as a social
satirist, can believe that he does more than a limited job of
social understanding. John Dos Passes sees much, sees it often
in the great way of Flaubert, but can never use social fact as
more than either backdrop or "condition." Of our novelists
today perhaps only William Faulkner deals with society as
the field of tragic reality and he has the disadvantage of being
limited to a provincial scene.
It would seem that Americans have a kind of resistance to
looking closely at society. They appear to believe that to
touch accurately on the matter of class, to take full note of
214 The Liberal Imagination
snobbery, is somehow to demean themselves. It Is as if we
felt that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled
which, of course, may possibly be the case. Americans will not
deny that we have classes and snobbery, but they seem to hold
it to be indelicate to take precise cognizance of these phenomena. Consider that Henry James is, among a large part
of our reading public, still held to be at fault for noticing
society as much as he did. Consider the conversation that has,
for some interesting reason, become a part of our literary folklore. Scott Fitzgerald said to Ernest Hemingway, "The very
rich are different from us." Hemingway replied, "Yes, they
have more money." I have seen the exchange quoted many
times and always with the intention of suggesting that Fitzgerald was infatuated by wealth and had received a salutary
rebuke from his democratic friend. But the truth is that after
a certain point quantity of money does indeed change into
quality of personality: in an important sense the very rich are
different from us. So are the very powerful, the very gifted, the
very poor. Fitzgerald was right, and almost for that remark
alone he must surely have been received in Balzac's bosom
in the heaven of novelists.
It is of course by no means true that the American reading
class has no interest in society. Its interest fails only before
society as it used to be represented by the novel. And if we
look at the commercially successful serious novels of the last
decade, we see that almost all of them have been written
from an intense social awareness it might be said that our
present definition of a serious book is one which holds before us some image of society to consider and condemn. What
is the situation of the dispossessed Oklahoma farmer and
whose fault it is, what situation the Jew finds himself in,
what it means to be a Negro, how one gets a bell for Adano,
what is the advertising business really like, what it means to
be insane and how society takes care of you or fails to do so
these are the matters which are believed to be most fertile
Manners., Morals, and the Novel 215
for the novelist, and certainly they are the subjects most
favored by our reading class.
The public is probably not deceived about the quality of
most o these books. If the question of quality is brought up,
the answer is likely to be: no, they are not great, they are not
Imaginative, they are not "literature." But there is an unex-
pressed addendum: and perhaps they are all the better for
not being imaginative, for not being literature they are not
literature, they are reality, and in a time like this what we
need is reality in large doses.
When, generations from now, the historian of our times
undertakes to describe the assumptions of our culture, he will
surely discover that the word reality is of central importance
in his understanding of us. He will observe that for some of
our philosophers the meaning of the w r ord was a good deal in
doubt, but that for our political writers, for many of our literary critics, and for most of our reading public, the word did
not open discussion but, rather, closed it. Reality, as conceived by us, is whatever is external and hard, gross, unpleasant. Involved in its meaning is the idea of power conceived
in a particular way. Some time ago I had occasion to remark
how, in the critical estimates of Theodore Dreiser, it is always being said that Dreiser has many faults but that it cannot be denied that he has great power. No one ever says "a
kind of power/' Power is assumed to be always "brute" power,
crude, ugly, and undiscriminating, the way an elephant appears to be. It is seldom understood to be the way an elephant
actually is, precise and discriminating; or the way electricity
is, swift and absolute and scarcely embodied.
The word reality is an honorific word and the future historian will naturally try to discover our notion of its pejorative opposite, appearance, mere appearance. He will find it
in our feeling about the internal; whenever we detect evidences of style and thought we suspect that reality is being
a little betrayed, that "mere subjectivity" is creeping in-
216 The Liberal Imagination
There follows from this our feeling about complication,
modulation, personal idiosyncrasy, and about social forms,
both the great and the small.
Having gone so far, our historian is then likely to discover
a puzzling contradiction. For we claim that the great advantage of reality is its hard, bedrock, concrete quality, yet everything we say about it tends toward the abstract and it almost
seems that what we want to find in reality is abstraction itself. Thus we believe that one of the unpleasant bedrock facts
is social class, but we become extremely impatient if ever we
are told that social class is indeed so real that it produces actual differences of personality. The very people who talk most
about class and its evils think that Fitzgerald was bedazzled
and Hemingway right. Or again, it might be observed that
in the degree that we speak in praise of the "individual" we
have contrived that our literature should have no individuals
in it no people, that is, who are shaped by our liking for the
interesting and memorable and special and precious.
Here, then, is our generalization: that in proportion as
we have committed ourselves to our particular idea of reality
we have lost our interest in manners. For the novel this is a
definitive condition because it is inescapably true that in the
novel manners make men. It does not matter in what sense
the word manners is taken it is equally true of the sense
which so much interested Proust or of the sense which interested Dickens or, indeed, of the sense which interested
Homer. The Duchesse de Guermantes unable to delay departure for the dinner party to receive properly from her
friend Swann the news that he is dying but able to delay to
change the black slippers her husband objects to; Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller; Priam and Achilles they exist by
reason of their observed manners.
So true is this, indeed, so creative is the novelist's awareness
of manners, that we may say that it is a function of his love.
It is some sort of love that Fielding has for Squire Western
Manners, Morals, and the Novel 217
that allows him to note the great, gross details which bring the
insensitive sentient man into existence for us. If that is true,
we are forced to certain conclusions about our literature and
about the particular definition of reality which has shaped
it. The reality we admire tells us that the observation of manners is trivial and even malicious, that there are things much
more important for the novel to consider. As a consequence
our social sympathies have indeed broadened, but in proportion as they have done so we have lost something of our power
of love, for our novels can never create characters who truly
exist. We make public demands for love, for we know that
broad social feeling should be infused with warmth, and we
receive a kind of public product which we try to believe is not
cold potatoes. The reviewers of Helen Howe's novel of a
few years ago, We Happy Few, thought that its satiric first
part, an excellent comment on the manners of a small but
significant segment of society, was ill-natured and unsatisfactory, but they approved the second part, which is the record of
the heroine's self-accusing effort to come into communication with the great soul of America. Yet it should have been
clear that the satire had its source in a kind of affection, in a
real community of feeling, and told the truth, while the second part, said to be so "warm/* was mere abstraction, one
more example of our public idea of ourselves and our national life. John Steinbeck is generally praised both for his reality and his warmheartedness, but in The Wayward Bus the
lower-class characters receive a doctrinaire affection in proportion to the suffering and sexuality which define their existence, while the ill-observed middle-class characters are
made to submit not only to moral judgment but to the withdrawal of all fellow-feeling, being mocked for their very misfortunes and almost for their susceptibility to death. Only a
little thought or even less feeling is required to perceive that
the basis of his creation is the coldest response to abstract
ideas.
The Liberal Imagination
Two novelists of the older sort had a prevision of our pres-
ent situation. In Henry James's The Princess Casamassima
there is a scene in which the heroine is told about the existence of a conspiratorial group of revolutionaries pledged to
the destruction of all existing society. She has for some time
been drawn by a desire for social responsibility; she has
wanted to help "the people/' she has longed to discover just
such a group as she now hears about, and she exclaims in joy,
"Then it's real, it's solid!" We are intended to hear the Princess's glad cry with the knowledge that she is a woman who
despises herself, "that in the darkest hour of her life she sold
herself for a title and a fortune. She regards her doing so as
such a terrible piece of frivolity that she can never for the
rest of her days be serious enough to make up for it." She
seeks out poverty, suffering, sacrifice, and death because she
believes that these things alone are real; she comes to believe
that art is contemptible; she withdraws her awareness and
love from the one person of her acquaintance who most deserves them, and she increasingly scorns whatever suggests
variety and modulation, and is more and more dissatisfied
with the humanity of the present in her longing for the more
perfect humanity of the future. It is one of the great points
that the novel makes that with each passionate step that she
takes toward what she calls the real, the solid, she in fact
moves further away from the life-giving reality.
In E. M. Forster's The Longest Journey there is a young
man named Stephen Wonham who, although a gentleman
born, has been carelessly brought up and has no real notion
of the responsibilities of his class. He has a friend, a country
laborer, a shepherd, and on two occasions he outrages the
feelings of certain intelligent, liberal, democratic people in
the book by his treatment of this friend. Once, when the
shepherd reneges on a bargain, Stephen quarrels with him
and knocks him down; and in the matter of the loan of a few
shillings he insists that the money be paid back to the last
Manners , Morals, and the Novel 219
farthing. The intelligent, liberal, democratic people know
that this is not the way to act to the poor. But Stephen cannot think of the shepherd as the poor nor, although he is a
country laborer, as an object of research by J. L. and Barbara
Hammond; he is rather a reciprocating subject in a relationship of affection as we say, a friend and therefore liable
to anger and required to pay his debts. But this view is held
to be deficient in intelligence, liberalism, and democracy.
In these two incidents we have the premonition of our
present cultural and social situation, the passionate selfreproachful addiction to a "strong" reality which must limit
its purview to maintain its strength, the replacement by abstraction of natural, direct human feeling. It is worth noting,
by the way, how clear is the line by which the two novels descend from Don Quixote how their young heroes come into
life with large preconceived ideas and are knocked about in
consequence; how both are concerned with the problem of
appearance and reality, The Longest Journey quite explicitly, The Princess Casamassima by indirection; how both
evoke the question of the nature of reality by contriving a
meeting and conflict of diverse social classes and take scrupulous note of the differences of manners. Both have as their
leading characters people who are specifically and passionately concerned with social injustice and both agree in saying that to act against social injustice is right and noble but
that to choose to act so does not settle all moral problems but
on the contrary generates new ones of an especially difficult
sort.
I have elsewhere given the name of moral realism to the
perception of the dangers of the moral life itself. Perhaps at
no other time has the enterprise of moral realism ever been
so much needed, for at no other time have so many people
committed themselves to moral righteousness. We have the
books that point out the bad conditions, that praise us for
taking progressive attitudes. We have no books that raise
220 The Liberal Imagination
questions in our minds not only about conditions but about
ourselves, that lead us to refine our motives and ask what
might lie behind our good impulses.
There is nothing so very terrible in discovering that something does lie behind. Nor does it need a Freud to make the
discovery. Here is a publicity release sent out by one of our
oldest and most respectable publishing houses. Under the
heading "What Makes Books Sell?" it reads, "Blank & Company reports that the current interest in horror stories has attracted a great number of readers to John Dash's novel . . .
because of its depiction of Nazi brutality. Critics and readers
alike have commented on the stark realism of Dash's handling
of the torture scenes in the book. The publishers originally
envisaged a woman's market because of the love story, now
find men reading the book because of the other angle/' This
does not suggest a more than usual depravity in the male
reader, for "the other angle" has always had a fascination, no
doubt a bad one, even for those who would not themselves
commit or actually witness an act of torture. I cite the extreme example only to suggest that something may indeed lie
behind our sober intelligent interest in moral politics. In
this instance the pleasure in the cruelty is protected and
licensed by moral indignation. In other instances moral indignation, which has been said to be the favorite emotion of
the middle class, may be in itself an exquisite pleasure. To
understand thi*s does not invalidate moral indignation but
only sets up the conditions on which it ought to be entertained, only says when it is legitimate and when not.
But, the answer comes, however important it may be for
moral realism to raise questions in our minds about our
motives, is it not at best a matter of secondary importance?
Is it not of the first importance that we be given a direct and
immediate report on the reality that is daily being brought
to dreadful birth? The novels that have done this have effected much practical good, bringing to consciousness the
Manners, Morals, and the Novel 221
latent feelings of many people, making it harder for them to
be unaware or indifferent, creating an atmosphere in which
injustice finds it harder to thrive. To speak of moral realism is all very well. But it is an elaborate, even fancy, phrase
and it is to be suspected of having the intention of sophisticating the simple reality that is easily to be conceived. Life
presses us so hard, time is so short, the suffering of the world
is so huge, simple, unendurable anything that complicates
our moral fervor in dealing with reality as we immediately
see it and wish to drive headlong upon it must be regarded
with some impatience.
True enough: and therefore any defense of what I have
called moral realism must be made not in the name of some
highflown fineness of feeling but in the name of simple social
practicality. And there is indeed a simple social fact to which
moral realism has a simple practical relevance, but it is a fact
very difficult for us nowadays to perceive. It is that the moral
passions are even more willful and imperious and impatient
than the self-seeking passions. All history is at one in telling
us that their tendency is to be not only liberating but also
restrictive.
It is probable that at this time we are about to make great
changes in our social system. The world is ripe for such
changes and if they are not made in the direction of greater
social liberality, the direction forward, they will almost of
necessity be made in the direction backward, of a terrible
social niggardliness. We all know which of those directions
we want. But it is not enough to want it, not even enough to
work for it we must want it and work for it with intelligence.
Which means that we must be aware of the dangers which lie
in our most generous wishes. Some paradox of our natures
leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects
of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our co-
ercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and
222 The Liberal Imagination
tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral
realism which is the product o the free play of the moral im-
agination.
For our time the most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred years. It was
never, either aesthetically or morally, a perfect form and its
faults and failures can be quickly enumerated. But its great-
ness and its practical usefulness lay in its unremitting work of
involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to
put his own motives under examination, suggesting that reality is not as his conventional education has led him to see it.
It taught us, as no other genre ever did, the extent of human
variety and the value of this variety. It was the literary form to
which the emotions of understanding and forgiveness were
indigenous, as if by the definition of the form itself. At the
moment its impulse does not seem strong, for there never was
a time when the virtues of its greatness were so likely to be
thought of as weaknesses. Yet there never was a time when its
particular activity was so much needed, was of so much practical, political, and social use so much so that if its impulse does
not respond to the need, we shall have reason to be sad not
only over a waning form of art but also over our waning freedom.
The Kinsey Report
By virtue of its intrinsic nature and also because of its dramatic reception, the Kinsey Report, 1 as it has come to be
called, is an event of great importance in our culture. It is an
event which is significant in two separate ways, as symptom
and as therapy. The therapy lies in the large permissive effect
the Report is likely to have, the long way it goes toward establishing the community of sexuality. The symptomatic significance lies in the fact that the Report was felt to be needed at
all, that the community of sexuality requires now to be established in explicit quantitative terms. Nothing shows more
clearly the extent to which modern society has atomized itself
than the isolation in sexual ignorance which exists among us.
We have censored the folk knowledge of the most primal
things and have systematically dried up the social affections
which might naturally seek to enlighten and release. Many
cultures, the most primitive and the most complex, have entertained sexual fears of an irrational sort, but probably our
culture is unique in strictly isolating the individual in the
fears that society has devised. Now, having become somewhat
aware- of what we have perpetrated at great cost and with little
gain, we must assure ourselves by statistical science that the
solitude is imaginary. The Report will surprise one part of
the population with some facts and another part with other
facts, but really all that it says to society as a whole is that there
i Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B.
Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948.
223
224 The Liberal Imagination
Is an almost universal involvement in the sexual life and therefore much variety of conduct. This was taken for granted in
any comedy that Aristophanes put on the stage.
There is a further diagnostic significance to be found in the
fact that our society makes this effort of self-enlightenment
through the agency of science. Sexual conduct is inextricably
involved with morality, and hitherto it has been dealt with by
those representatives of our cultural imagination which are,
by their nature and tradition, committed to morality it has
been dealt with by religion, social philosophy, and literature.
But now science seems to be the only one of our institutions
which has the authority to speak decisively on the matter.
Nothing in the Report is more suggestive in a large cultural
way than the insistent claims it makes for its strictly scientific
nature, its pledge of indifference to all questions of morality
at the same time that it patently intends a moral effect. Nor
will any science do for the job it must be a science as simple
and materialistic as the subject can possibly permit. It must be
a science of statistics and not of ideas. The way for the Report
was prepared by Freud, but Freud, in all the years of his activity, never had the currency or authority with the public that
the Report has achieved in a matter of weeks.
The scientific nature of the Report must be taken in conjunction with the manner of its publication. The Report says
of itself tltat it is only a "preliminary survey," a work intended
to be the first step in a larger research; that it is nothing more
than an "accumulation of scientific fact," a collection of "objective data," a "report on what people do, which raises no
question of what they should do," and it is fitted out with a
full complement of charts, tables, and discussions of scientific
method. A work conceived and executed in this way is usually
presented only to an audience of professional scientists; and
the publishers of the Report, a medical house, pay their ritual
respects to the old tradition which held that not all medical or
quasi-medical knowledge was to be made easily available to
The Kinsey Report 225
the general lay reader, or at least not until it had been sub-
jected to professional debate; they tell us in a foreword for
what limited professional audience the book was primarily intended physicians, biologists, and social scientists and "teachers, social workers, personnel officers, law enforcement groups,
and others concerned with the direction of human behavior."
And yet the book has been so successfully publicized that for
many weeks it was a national best seller.
This way of bringing out a technical work of science is a
cultural phenomenon that ought not to pass without some
question. The public which receives this technical report, this
merely preliminary survey, this accumulation of data, has
never, even on its upper educational levels, been properly
instructed in the most elementary principles of scientific
thought. With this public, science is authority. It has been
trained to accept heedlessly "what science says/' which it conceives to be a unitary utterance. To this public nothing is
more valuable, more precisely "scientific/' and more finally
convincing than raw data without conclusions; no disclaimer
of conclusiveness can mean anything to it it has learned that
the disclaimer is simply the hallmark of the scientific attitude,
science's way of saying "thy unworthy servant/ 1
So that if the Report were really, as it claims to be, only an
accumulation of objective data, there would be some question
of the cultural wisdom of dropping it in a lump on the general
public. But in point of fact it is full of assumption and conclusion; it makes very positive statements on highly debatable
matters and it editorializes very freely. This preliminary survey gives some very conclusive suggestions to a public that is
quick to obey what science says, no matter how contradictory
science may be, which is most contradictory indeed. This is
the public that, on scientific advice, ate spinach in one generation and avoided it in the next, that in one decade trained
its babies to rigid Watsonian schedules and believed that affection corrupted the infant character, only to learn in the
226 The Liberal Imagination
next decade that rigid discipline was harmful and that cuddling was as scientific as induction.
Then there is the question of whether the Report does not
do harm by encouraging people in their commitment to
mechanical attitudes toward life. The tendency to divorce sex
from the other manifestations of life is already a strong one.
This truly absorbing study of sex in charts and tables, in data
and quantities, may have the effect of strengthening the tendency still more with people who are by no means trained to
invert the process of abstraction and to put the fact back into
the general life from which it has been taken. And the likely
mechanical implications of a statistical study are in this case
supported by certain fully formulated attitudes which the
authors strongly hold despite their protestations that they are
scientific to the point of holding no attitudes whatever.
These, I believe, are valid objections to the book's indiscriminate circulation. And yet I also believe that there is some-
thing good about the manner of publication, something honest
and right. Every complex society has its agencies which are
"concerned with the direction of human behavior," but we
today are developing a new element in that old activity, the
element of scientific knowledge. Whatever the Report claims
for itself, the social sciences in general no longer pretend that
they can merely describe what people do; they now have the
clear consciousness of their power to manipulate and adjust.
First for industry and then for government, sociology has
shown its instrumental nature. A government which makes
use of social knowledge still suggests benignity; and in an age
that daily brings the proliferation of government by police
methods it may suggest the very spirit of rational liberalism.
Yet at least one sociologist has expressed the fear that sociology
may become the instrument of a bland tyranny it is the same
fear that Dostoevski gave immortal expression to in "The
Grand Inquisitor." And indeed there is something repulsive
in the idea of men being studied for their own good. The
The Kinsey Report 227
paradigm of what repels us is to be found in the common situation of the child who is understood by its parents, hemmed in,
anticipated and lovingly circumscribed, thoroughly taped,
finding it easier and easier to conform internally and in the
future to the parents' own interpretation of the external acts
of the past, and so, yielding to understanding as never to coercion, does not develop the mystery and wildness of spirit which
it is still our grace to believe is the mark of full humanness.
The act of understanding becomes an act of control.
If, then, we are to live under the aspect of sociology, let us
at least all be sociologists together let us broadcast what
every sociologist knows, and let us all have a share in observing one another, including the sociologists. The general indiscriminate publication of the Report makes sociology a little
less the study of many men by a few men and a little more
man's study of himself. There is something right in turning
loose the Report on the American public it turns the American public loose on the Report. It is right that the Report
should be sold in stores that never before sold books and
bought by people who never before bought books, and passed
from hand to hand and talked about and also snickered at and
giggled over and generally submitted to humor: American
popular culture has surely been made the richer by the Report's gift of a new folk hero he already is clearly the hero of
the Report the "scholarly and skilled lawyer" who for thirty
years has had an orgasmic frequency of thirty times a week.
As for the objection to the involvement of sex with science,
it may be said that if science, through the Report, serves in any
way to free the physical and even the "mechanical" aspects of
sex, it may by that much have acted to free the emotions it
might seem to deny. And perhaps only science could effectively
undertake the task of freeing sexuality from science itself.
Nothing so much as science has reinforced the moralistic or religious prohibitions in regard to sexuality. At some point in the
history of Europe, some time in the Reformation, masturba-
228 The Liberal Imagination
tion ceased to be thought of as merely a sexual sin which could
be dealt with like any other sexual sin, and, perhaps by
analogy with the venereal diseases with which the sexual mind
of Europe was obsessed, came to be thought o as the specific
cause of mental and physical disease, of madness and decay. 2
The prudery of Victorian England went forward with scientific hygiene; and both in Europe and in America the sexual
mind was haunted by the idea of degeneration, apparently by
analogy with the second law of thermodynamics here is enlightened liberal opinion in 1896: "The effects of venereal
disease have been treated at length, but the amount of vitality
burned out through lust has never been and, perhaps, never
can be adequately measured/' 3 The very word sex, which we
now utter so casually, came into use for scientific reasons, to
replace love, which had once been indiscriminately used but
was now to be saved for ideal purposes, and lust, which came
to seem both too pejorative and too human: sex implied scientific neutrality, then vague devaluation, for the word which
neutralizes the mind of the observer also neuterizes the men
and women who are being observed. Perhaps the Report is the
superfetation of neutrality and objectivity which, in the
dialectic of culture, was needed before sex could be free of
their cold dominion.
Certainly it is a great merit of the Report that it brings to
mind the earliest and best commerce between sex and science
the best thing about the Report is the quality that makes us
remember Lucretius. The dialectic of culture has its jokes,
and alma Venus having once been called to preside protectively over science, the situation is now reversed. The Venus
of the Report does not, like the Venus of De Rerum Natura,
shine in the light of the heavenly signs, nor does the earth put
forth flowers for her. She is rather fusty and hole-in-the-corner
2 See Abram Kardiner, The Psychological Frontiers of Society, p. 32 and
the
footnote on p. 441.
3 Article "Degeneration" in The Encyclopedia of Social Reform.
The Kinsey Report
and no doubt it does not help her charm to speak of her in
terms of mean frequencies of 3.2. No putti attend her: although Dr. Gregg in his Preface refers to sex as the reproductive instinct, there is scarcely any further indication in the
book that sex has any connection with propagation. Yet
clearly all things still follow where she leads, and somewhere
in the authors' assumptions is buried the genial belief that
still without her "nothing comes forth into the shining borders of light, nothing joyous and lovely is made." Her pandemic quality is still here it is one of the great points of the
Report how much of every kind of desire there is, how early it
begins, how late it lasts. Her well-known jealousy is not abated,
and prodigality is still her characteristic virtue: the Report
assures us that those who respond to her earliest continue to
do so longest. The Lucretian flocks and herds are here too.
Professor Kinsey is a zoologist and he properly keeps us always
in mind of our animal kinship, even though he draws some
very illogical conclusions from it; and those who are honest
will have to admit that their old repulsion by the idea of
human-animal contacts is somewhat abated by the chapter on
this subject, which is, oddly, the only chapter in the book
which hints that sex may be touched with tenderness. This
large, recognizing, Lucretian sweep of the Report is the best
thing about it and it makes up for much that is deficient and
confused in its ideas.
But the Report is something more than a public and symbolic act of cultural revision in which, while the Heavenly
Twins brood benignly over the scene in the form of the
National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation,
Professor Kinsey and his coadjutors drag forth into the light
all the hidden actualities of sex so that they may lose their
dark power and become domesticated among us. It is also an
early example of science undertaking to deal head-on with a
uniquely difficult matter that has traditionally been involved
in valuation and morality. We must ask the question very
The Liberal Imagination
seriously: how does science conduct itself in such an enterprise?
Certainly it does not conduct itself the way it says it does. I
have already suggested that the Report overrates its own objectivity. The authors, who are enthusiastically committed to
their method and to their principles, make the mistake of
believing that, being scientists, they do not deal in assumptions, preferences, and conclusions. Nothing comes more
easily to their pens than the criticism of the subjectivity of
earlier writers on sex, yet their own subjectivity is sometimes
extreme. In the nature of the enterprise, a degree of subjectivity was inevitable. Intellectual safety would then seem to
lie not only in increasing the number of mechanical checks or
in more rigorously examining those assumptions which had
been brought to conscious formulation, but also in straightforwardly admitting that subjectivity was bound to appear
and inviting the reader to be on the watch for it. This would
not have guaranteed an absolute objectivity, but it would have
made for a higher degree of relative objectivity. It would have
done a thing even more important it would have taught the
readers of the Report something about the scientific processes
to which they submit their thought.
The first failure of objectivity occurs in the title of the Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. That the behavior
which is studied is not that of the human male but only that
of certain North American males has no doubt been generally
observed and does not need further comment. 4 But the intention of the word behavior requires notice. By behavior the
Report means behavioristic behavior, only that behavior
which is physical. "To a large degree the present study has
been confined to securing a record of the individual's overt
sexual experiences." This limitation is perhaps forced on the
authors by considerations of method, because it will yield
4 The statistical method of the report lies, necessarily, outside my
purview.
Nor am I able to assess with any confidence the validity of the
interviewing
methods that were employed.
The Kinsey Report 231
simpler data and more manageable statistics, but it is also a
limitation which suits their notion of human nature and its
effect is to be seen throughout the book.
The Report, then, is a study of sexual behavior in so far as it
can be quantitatively measured. This is certainly very useful.
But, as we might fear, the sexuality that is measured is taken
to be the definition of sexuality itself. The authors are certainly not without interest in what they call attitudes, but
they believe that attitudes are best shown by "overt sexual
experiences." We want to know, of course, what they mean by
an experience and we want to know by what principles of
evidence they draw their conclusions about attitudes.
We are led to see that their whole conception of a sexual experience is totally comprised by the physical act and that their
principles of evidence are entirely quantitative and cannot
carry them beyond the conclusion that the more the merrier.
Quality is not integral to what they mean by experience. As I
have suggested, the Report is partisan with sex, it wants people to have a good sexuality. But by good it means nothing
else but frequent. "It seems safe to assume that daily orgasm
would be within the capacity of the average male and that the
more than daily rates which have been observed for some
primate species could be matched by a large portion of the
human population if sexual activity were unrestricted." The
Report never suggests that a sexual experience is anything
but the discharge of specifically sexual tension and therefore
seems to conclude that frequency is always the sign of a robust
sexuality. Yet masturbation in children may be and often is
the expression not of sexuality only but of anxiety. In the
same way, adult intercourse may be the expression of anxiety;
its frequency may not be so much robust as compulsive.
The Report is by no means unaware of the psychic conditions of sexuality, yet it uses the concept almost always under
the influence of its quantitative assumption. In a summary
passage (p. 159) it describes the different intensities of orgasm
2 32 The Liberal Imagination
and the various degrees of satisfaction, but disclaims any intention of taking these variations into account in its record of
behavior. The Report holds out the hope to respectable males
that they might be as frequent in performance as underworld
characters if they were as unrestrained as this group. But before the respectable males aspire to this unwonted freedom
they had better ascertain in how far the underworld characters
are ridden by anxiety and in how far their sexuality is to be
correlated with other ways of dealing with anxiety, such as
dope, and in how far it is actually enjoyable. The Report's
own data suggest that there may be no direct connection between on the one hand lack of restraint and frequency and on
the other hand psychic health; they tell us of men in the lower
social levels who in their sexual careers have intercourse with
many hundreds of girls but who despise their sexual partners
and cannot endure relations with the same girl more than
once.
But the Report, as we shall see, is most resistant to the possibility of making any connection between the sexual life and
the psychic structure. This strongly formulated attitude of
the Report is based on the assumption that the whole actuality
of sex is anatomical and physiological; the emotions are dealt
with very much as if they were a "superstructure." "The subject's awareness of the erotic situation is summed up by this
statement that he is 'emotionally' aroused; but the material
sources of the emotional disturbance are rarely recognized,
either by laymen or scientists, both of whom are inclined to
think in terms of passion, or natural drive, or a libido, which
partakes of the mystic 5 more than it does of solid anatomy
5 We must observe how the scientific scorn of the "mystic" quite
abates when
the "mystic" suits the scientist's purpose. The Report is explaining why
the
interviews were not checked by means of narcosyn thesis, lie-detectors,
etc.:
"In any such study which needs to secure quantities of data from
human subjects, there is no way except to win their voluntary cooperation through
the
establishment of that intangible thing known as rapport." This
intangible
thing is established by looking the respondent squarely in the eye. It
might be
asked why a thing which is intangible but real enough to assure
scientific ac-
The Kinsey Report 233
and physiologic function." Now there is of course a clear instrumental advantage in being able to talk about psychic or
emotional phenomena in terms of physiology, but to make a
disjunction between the two descriptions of the same event,
to make the anatomical and physiological description the
"source" of the emotional and then to consider it as the more
real of the two, is simply to commit not only the Reductive
Fallacy but also what William James called the Psychologist's
Fallacy. It must bring under suspicion any subsequent generalization which the Report makes about the nature of sexuality. 6
The emphasis on the anatomical and physiological nature of
sexuality is connected with the Report's strong reliance on
animal behavior as a norm. The italics in the following quotation are mine. "For those who like the term, it is clear that
there is a sexual drive which cannot be set aside for any large
portion of the population, by any sort of social convention,
For those who prefer to think in simpler terms of action and
reaction, it is a picture of an animal who, however civilized or
cultured, continues to respond to the constantly present sexual
stimuli, albeit with some social and physical restraints." The
Report obviously finds the second formulation to be superior
to the first, and implies with a touch of irony that those who
prefer it are on firmer ground.
Now there are several advantages in keeping in mind our
curacy should not be real enough to be considered as having an effect
in sexual
behavior.
e The implications of the Reductive Fallacy may be seen by
paraphrasing
the sentence I have quoted in which Professor Kinsey commits it:
"Professor
Kinsey's awareness of the intellectual situation is summed up by his
statement
that he 'has had an idea' or 'has come to a conclusion'; but the material
sources
of his intellectual disturbances are rarely recognized, either by laymen
or scientists, both of whom are inclined to think in terms of 'thought' or
'intellection'
or 'cognition/ which partakes of the mystic more than it does of solid
anatomy
or physiologic function." The Psychologist's Fallacy is what James calls
"the
confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about
which he is
making a report." "Another variety of the psychologist's fallacy is the
assumption that the mental fact studied must be conscious of itself as the
psychologist
is conscious of it." Principles of Psychology, vol. i, pp. 196-97.
234 The Liberal Imagination
own animal nature and our family connection with the other
animals. The advantages are instrumental, moral, and poetic
I use the last word for want of a better to suggest the mere
pleasure in finding kinship with some animals. But perhaps
no idea is more difficult to use with precision than this one. In
the Report it is used to establish a dominating principle of
judgment, which is the Natural. As a concept of judgment this
is notoriously deceptive and has been belabored for generations, but the Report knows nothing of its dangerous reputation and uses it with the nai'vest confidence. And although the
Report directs the harshest language toward the idea of the
Normal, saying that it has stood in the way of any true scientific knowledge of sex, it is itself by no means averse to letting
the idea of the Natural develop quietly into the idea of the
Normal. The Report has in mind both a physical normality
as suggested by its belief that under optimal conditions men
should be able to achieve the orgasmic frequency of the
primates and a moral normality, the acceptability, on the
authority of animal behavior, of certain usually taboo practices.
It is inevitable that the concept of the Natural should haunt
any discussion of sex. It is inevitable that it should make
trouble, but most of all for a scientific discussion that bars
judgments of value. Thus, in order to show that homosexuality is not a neurotic manifestation, as the Freudians say it is,
the Report adduces the homosexual behavior of rats. But the
argument de animalibus must surely stand by its ability to be
inverted and extended. Thus, in having lost sexual periodicity, has the human animal lost naturalness? Again, the female
mink, as we learn from the Report itself, fiercely resists intercourse and must be actually coerced into submission. Is it she
who is unnatural or is her defense of her chastity to be taken
as a comment on the females, animal or human, who willingly
submit or who merely play at escape? Professor Kinsey is like
no one so much as Sir Percival in Malory, who, seeing a lion
The Kinsey Report 235
and a serpent in battle with each other, decided to help the
lion, "for he was the more natural beast of the two."
This awkwardness in the handling of ideas is characteristic
of the Report. It is ill at ease with any idea that is in the least
complex and it often tries to get rid of such an idea in favor
of another that has the appearance of not going beyond the
statement of physical fact. We see this especially in the handling of certain Freudian ideas. The Report acknowledges its
debt to Freud with the generosity of spirit that marks it in
other connections and it often makes use of Freudian concepts
in a very direct and sensible way. Yet nothing could be
clumsier than its handling of Freud's idea of pregenital gener-
alized infantile sexuality. Because the Report can show, what
is interesting and significant, that infants are capable of actual
orgasm, although without ejaculation, it concludes that infantile sexuality is not generalized but specifically genital. But
actually it has long been known, though the fact of orgasm had
not been established, that infants can respond erotically to
direct genital stimulation, and this knowledge does not contradict the Freudian idea that there is a stage in infant development in which sexuality is generalized throughout the body
rather than specifically centered in the genital area; the fact of
infant orgasm must be interpreted in conjunction with other
and more complex manifestations of infant sexuality. 7
The Report, we may say, has an extravagant fear of all ideas
that do not seem to it to be, as it were, immediately dictated by
simple physical fact. Another way of saying this is that the Report is resistant to any idea that seems to refer to a specifically
human situation. An example is the position it takes on the
matter of male potency. The folk feeling, where it is formulated on the question, and certainly where it is formulated by
women, holds that male potency is not to be measured, as the
7 The Report also handles the idea of sublimation in a very clumsy way.
It
does not represent accurately what the Freudian theory of sublimation
is. For
this, however, there is some excuse in the change of emphasis and
even in
meaning in Freud's use of the word.
236 The Liberal Imagination
Report measures it, merely by frequency, but by the ability to
withhold orgasm long enough to bring the woman to climax.
This is also the psychoanalytic view, which holds further that
the inability to sustain intercourse is the result of unconscious
fear or resentment. This view is very strongly resisted by the
Report. The denial is based on mammalian behavior "in
many species" (but not in all?) ejaculation follows almost im-
mediately upon intromission; in chimpanzees ejaculation
occurs in ten to twenty seconds. The Report therefore concludes that the human male who ejaculates immediately upon
intromission "is quite normal [here the word becomes suddenly permissible] among mammals and usual among his own
species." Indeed, the Report finds it odd that the term "impotent" should be applied to such rapid responses. "It would be
difficult to find another situation in which an individual who
was quick and intense in his responses was labeled anything
but superior, and that in most instances is exactly what the
rapidly ejaculating male probably is, however inconvenient
and unfortunate his qualities may be from the standpoint of
the wife in the relationship."
But by such reasoning the human male who is quick and
intense in his leap to the lifeboat is natural and superior, however inconvenient and unfortunate his speed and intensity
may be to the wife he leaves standing on the deck, as is also the
man who makes a snap judgment, who bites his dentist's finger, who kicks the child who annoys him, who bolts his or
another's food, who is incontinent of his feces. Surely the
problem of the natural in the human was solved four centuries
ago by Rabelais, and in the simplest naturalistic terms; and it
is sad to have the issue all confused again by the naivete of
men of science. Rabelais' solution lay in the simple perception of the natural ability and tendency of man to grow in the
direction of organization and control. The young Gargantua
in his natural infancy had all the quick and intense responses
just enumerated; had his teachers confused the traits of his
The Kinsey Report 237
natural infancy with those of his natural manhood, he would
not have been the more natural but the less; he would have
been a monster.
In considering the Report as a major cultural document, we
must not underestimate the significance of its petulant protest
against the inconvenience to the male of the unjust demand
that is made upon him. This protest is tantamount to saying
that sexuality is not to be involved in specifically human situations or to be connected with desirable aims that are conceived
of in specifically human terms. We may leave out of account
any ideal reasons which would lead a man to solve the human
.situation of the discrepancy arising from conditions of biology or of culture or of both between his own orgasmic speed
and that of his mate, and we can consider only that it might
be hedonistically desirable for him to do so, for advantages
presumably accrue to him in the woman's accessibility and
responsiveness. Advantages of this kind, however, are precisely
the matters of quality in experience that the Report ignores. 8
And its attitude on the question of male potency is but one
example of the Report's insistence on drawing sexuality apart
from the general human context. It is striking how small a
role woman plays in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. We
learn nothing about the connection of sex and reproduction;
the connection, from the sexual point of view, is certainly not
constant yet it is of great interest. The pregnancy or possibility of pregnancy of his mate has a considerable effect, sometimes one way, sometimes the other, on the sexual behavior of
the male; yet in the index under Pregnancy there is but a
single entry "fear of." Again, the contraceptive devices
which Pregnancy j fear of, requires have a notable influence on
s It is hard not to make a connection between the Report's strong stand
against any delay in the male orgasm and its equally strong insistence
that there
is no difference for the woman between a clitoral and vaginal orgasm, a
view
which surely needs more investigation before it is as flatly put as the
Report
puts it. The conjunction of the two ideas suggests the desirability of a
sexuality
which uses a minimum of sexual apparatus.
238 The Liberal Imagination
male sexuality; but the index lists only Contraception^ techniques. Or again, menstruation has an elaborate mythos which
men take very seriously; but the two indexed passages which
refer to menstruation give no information about its relation
to sexual conduct.
Then too the Report explicitly and stubbornly resists the
idea that sexual behavior is involved with the whole of the
individual's character. In this it is strangely inconsistent. In
the conclusion of its chapter on masturbation, after saying that
masturbation does no physical harm and, if there are no conflicts over it, no mental harm, it goes on to raise the question of
the effect of adult masturbation on the ultimate personality of
the individual. With a certain confusion of cause and effect
which we need not dwell on, it says: "It is now clear that masturbation is relied upon by the upper [social] level primarily
because it has insufficient outlet through heterosexual coitus.
This is, to a degree, an escape from reality, and the effect upon
the ultimate personality of the individual is something that
needs consideration/' The question is of course a real one, yet
the Report strenuously refuses to extend the principle of it
to any other sexual activity. It summarily rejects the conclusions of psychoanalysis which make the sexual conduct an
important clue to, even the crux of, character. It finds the
psychoanalytical view unacceptable for two reasons: (i) The
psychiatric practitioner misconceives the relation between
sexual aberrancy and psychic illness because only those sexually aberrant people who are ill seek out the practitioner, who
therefore never learns about the large incidence of mental
health among the sexually aberrant. (2) The emotional illness
which sends the sexually aberrant person to find psychiatric
help is the result of no flaw in the psyche itself that is connected with the aberrancy but is the result only of the fear of
social disapproval of his sexual conduct. And the Report instances the many men who are well adjusted socially and who
yet break, among them, all the sexual taboos.
The Kinsey Report 239
The quality of the argument which the Report here advances is as significant as the wrong conclusions it reaches. "It
is not possible," the Report says, "to insist that any departure
from the sexual mores, or any participation in socially taboo
activities, always, or even usually, involves a neurosis or psychosis, for the case histories abundantly demonstrate that most
individuals who engage in taboo activities make satisfactory
social adjustments." In this context either "neuroses and psychoses" are too loosely used to stand for all psychic maladjustment, or "social adjustment" is too loosely used to stand for
emotional peace and psychic stability. When the Report goes
on to cite the "socially and intellectually significant persons,"
the "successful scientists, educators, physicians," etc., who
have among them "accepted the whole range of the so-called
abnormalities," we must keep in mind that very intense emotional disturbance, known only to the sufferer, can go along
with the efficient discharge of social duties, and that the psychoanalyst could counter with as long a list of distinguished
and efficient people who do consult him.
Then, only an interest in attacking straw men could have
led the Report to insist that psychoanalysis is wrong in saying
that any departure from sexual mores, or any participation in
sexually taboo activities, involves a neurosis or a psychosis, for
psychoanalysis holds nothing like this view. It is just at this
point that distinctions are needed of a sort which the Report
seems not to want to make. For example: the Report comes
out in a bold and simple way for the naturalness and normality
and therefore for the desirability of mouth-genital contacts in
heterosexual love-making. This is a form of sexual expression
which is officially taboo enough, yet no psychoanalyst would
say that its practice indicated a neurosis or psychosis. But a
psychoanalyst would say that a person who disliked or was
unable to practice any other form of sexual contact thereby
gave evidence of a neurotic strain in his psychic constitution.
His social adjustment, in the rather crude terms which the
240 The Liberal Imagination
Report conceives of it, might not be impaired, but certainly
the chances are that his psychic life would show signs of disturbance, not from the practice itself but from the psychic
needs which made him insist on it. It is not the breaking of
the taboo but the emotional circumstance of the breaking of
the taboo that is significant.
The Report handles in the same oversimplified way and
with the same confusing use of absolute concepts the sexual
aberrancy which is, I suppose, the most complex and the most
important in our cultural life, homosexuality. It rejects the
view that homosexuality is innate and that "no modification
of it may be expected." But then it goes on also to reject the
view that homosexuality provides evidence of a "psychopathic
personality." "Psychopathic personality" is a very strong term
which perhaps few analysts would wish to use in this connection. Perhaps even the term "neurotic" would be extreme in a
discussion which, in the manner of the Report, takes "social
adjustment," as indicated by status, to be the limit of its analysis of character. But this does not leave the discussion where
the Report seems to want to leave it at the idea that homosexuality is to be accepted as a form of sexuality like another
and that it is as "natural" as heterosexuality, a judgment to
which the Report is led in part because of the surprisingly
large incidence of homosexuality it finds in the population.
Nor does the practice of "an increasing proportion of the most
skilled psychiatrists who make no attempt to redirect behavior, but who devote their attention to helping an individual
accept himself" imply what the Report seems to want it to,
that these psychiatrists have thereby judged homosexuality to
be an unexceptionable form of sexuality; it is rather that, in
many cases, they are able to effect no change in the psychic
disposition and therefore do the sensible and humane next
best thing. Their opinion of the etiology of homosexuality as
lying in some warp as our culture judges it of the psychic
structure has not, I believe, changed. And I think that they
The Kinsey Report 241
would say that the condition that produced the homosexuality
also produce other character traits on which judgment could
be passed. This judgment need by no means be totally adverse; as passed upon individuals it need not be adverse at all;
but there can be no doubt that a society in which homosexuality was dominant or even accepted would be different in nature and quality from one in which it was censured.
That the Report refuses to hold this view of homosexuality,
or any other view of at least equivalent complexity, leads us
to take into account the motives that animate the work, and
when we do, we see how very characteristically American a
document the Report is. In speaking of its motives, I have in
mind chiefly its impulse toward acceptance and liberation, its
broad and generous desire for others that they be not harshly
judged. Much in the Report is to be understood as having
been dictated by a recoil from the crude and often brutal rejection which society has made of the persons it calls sexually
aberrant. The Report has the intention of habituating its
readers to sexuality in all its manifestations; it wants to establish, as it were, a democratic pluralism of sexuality. And this
good impulse toward acceptance and liberation is not unique
with the Report but very often shows itself in those parts of
our intellectual life which are more or less official and institutionalized. It is, for example, far more established in the
universities than most of us with our habits of criticism of
America, particularly of American universities, will easily admit; and it is to a considerable extent an established attitude
with the foundations that support intellectual projects.
That this generosity of mind is much to be admired goes
without saying. But when we have given it all the credit it
deserves as a sign of something good and enlarging in American life, we cannot help observing that it is often associated
with an almost intentional intellectual weakness. It goes with
a nearly conscious aversion from making intellectual distinc-
tions, almost as if out of the belief that an intellectual dis-
242 The Liberal Imagination
tinction must inevitably lead to a social discrimination or
exclusion. We might say that those who most explicitly assert
and wish to practice the democratic virtues have taken it as
their assumption that all social facts with the exception of
exclusion and economic hardship must be accepted, not
merely in the scientific sense but also in the social sense, in the
sense, that is, that no judgment must be passed on them, that
any conclusion drawn from them which perceives values and
consequences will turn out to be "undemocratic/ 7
The Report has it in mind to raise questions about the
official restrictive attitudes toward sexual behavior, including
those attitudes that are formulated on the statute books of
most states. To this end it accumulates facts with the intention
of showing that standards of judgment of sexual conduct as
they now exist do not have real reference to the actual sexual
behavior of the population. So far, so good. But then it goes
on to imply that there can be only one standard for the judgment of sexual behavior that is, sexual behavior as it actually
exists; which is to say that sexual behavior is not to be judged
at all, except, presumably, in so far as it causes pain to others.
(But from its attitude to the "inconvenience'* of the "wife in
the relationship/' we must presume that not all pain is to be
reckoned with.) Actually the Report does not stick to its own
standard of judgment; it is, as I have shown, sometimes very
willing to judge among behaviors. But the preponderant
weight of its argument is that a fact is a physical fact, to be
considered only in its physical aspect and apart from any idea
or ideal that might make it a social fact, as having no ascertainable personal or cultural meaning and no possible consequences as being, indeed, not available to social interpretation at all. In short, the Report by its primitive conception of
the nature of fact quite negates the importance and even the
existence of sexuality as a social fact. That is why, although it
is possible to say of the Report that it brings light, it is necessary to say of it that it spreads confusion.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
" 'So be it! I die content and my destiny is fulfilled/ said
Racine's Orestes; and there is more in his speech than the insanely bitter irony that appears on the surface. Racine, fully
conscious of this tragic grandeur, permits Orestes to taste for
a moment before going mad with grief the supreme joy of a
hero; to assume his exemplary role." The heroic awareness of
which Andre Gide speaks in his essay on Goethe was granted
to Scott Fitzgerald for whatever grim joy he might find in it.
It is a kind of seal set upon his heroic quality that he was able
to utter his vision of his own fate publicly and aloud and in
Esquire with no lessening of his dignity, even with an en-
hancement of it. The several essays in which Fitzgerald examined his life in crisis have been gathered together by
Edmund Wilson who is for many reasons the most appropriate editor possible and published, together with Fitzgerald's notebooks and some letters, as well as certain tributes
and memorabilia, in a volume called, after one of the essays,
The Crack-Up. It is a book filled with the grief of the lost and
the might-have-been, with physical illness and torture of mind.
Yet the heroic quality is so much here, Fitzgerald's assumption of the "exemplary role" is so proper and right that it
occurs to us to say, and not merely as a piety but as the most
accurate expression of what we really do feel, that
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
243
244 The Liberal Imagination
This isn't what we may fittingly say on all tragic occasions,
but the original occasion for these words has a striking aptness
to Fitzgerald. Like Milton's Samson, he had the consciousness
of having misused the power with which he had been endowed. "I had been only a mediocre caretaker ... of my
talent," he said. And the parallel carries further, to the sojourn among the Philistines and even to the maimed hero
exhibited and mocked for the amusement of the crowd on
the afternoon of September 25, 1936, the New York Evening
Post carried on its front page a feature story in which the triumphant reporter tells how he managed to make his way into
the Southern nursing home where the sick and distracted
Fitzgerald was being cared for and there "interviewed" him,
taking all due note of the contrast between the present humiliation and the past glory. It was a particularly gratuitous
horror, and yet in retrospect it serves to augment the moral
force of the poise and fortitude which marked Fitzgerald's
mind in the few recovered years that were left to him.
The root of Fitzgerald's heroism is to be found, as it sometimes is in tragic heroes, in his power of love. Fitzgerald wrote
much about love, he was preoccupied with it as between men
and women, but it is not merely where he is being explicit
about it that his power appears. It is to be seen where eventually all a writer's qualities have their truest existence, in his
style. Even in Fitzgerald's early, cruder books, or even in his
commercial stories, and even when the style is careless, there
is a tone and pitch to the sentences which suggest his warmth
and tenderness, and, what is rare nowadays and not likely to
be admired, his gentleness without softness. In the equipment
of the moralist and therefore in the equipment of the novelist,
aggression plays an important part, and although it is of
course sanctioned by the novelist's moral intention and by
whatever truth of moral vision he may have, it is often none
the less fierce and sometimes even cruel. Fitzgerald was a moralist to the core and his desire to "preach at people in some ac-
F. Scott Fitzgerald 245
ceptable form'* is the reason he gives for not going the way of
Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart we must always remember
in judging him how many real choices he was free and forced
to make and he was gifted with the satiric eye; yet we feel
that in his morality he was more drawn to celebrate the good
than to denounce the bad. We feel of him, as we cannot feel
of all moralists, that he did not attach himself to the good because this attachment would sanction his fierceness toward the
bad his first impulse was to love the good, and we know this
the more surely because we perceive that he loved the good not
only with his mind but also with his quick senses and his
youthful pride and desire.
He really had but little impulse to blame, which is the more
remarkable because our culture peculiarly honors the act of
blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.
"Forbearance, good word/* is one of the jottings in his notebook. When it came to blame, he preferred, it seems, to blame
himself. He even did not much want to blame the world.
Fitzgerald knew where "the world" was at fault. He knew that
it was the condition, the field, of tragedy. He is conscious of
"what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of
his dreams/' But he never made out that the world imposes
tragedy, either upon the heroes of his novels, whom he called
his "brothers," or upon himself. When he speaks of his own
fate, he does indeed connect it with the nature of the social
world in which he had his early flowering, but he never finally
lays it upon that world, even though at the time when he was
most aware of his destiny it was fashionable with minds more
pretentious than his to lay all personal difficulty whatever at
the door of the "social order." It is, he feels, his fate and as
much as to anything else in Fitzgerald, we respond to the delicate tension he maintained between his idea of personal free
will and his idea of circumstance: we respond to that moral
and intellectual energy. "The test of a first-rate intelligence,"
he said, "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind,
246 The Liberal Imagination
at the same time, and still retain the ability to function/"
The power of love in Fitzgerald, then, went hand in hand
with a sense of personal responsibility and perhaps created it.
But it often happens that the tragic hero can conceive and
realize a love that is beyond his own prudence or beyond his
powers of dominance or of self-protection, so that he is destroyed by the very thing that gives him his spiritual status
and stature. From Proust we learn about a love that is destructive by a kind of corrosiveness, but from Fitzgerald's two
mature novels, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night,, we
learn about a love perhaps it is peculiarly American that
is destructive by reason of its very tenderness. It begins in
romance, sentiment, even "glamour" no one, I think, has remarked how innocent of mere "sex," how charged with senti-
ment is Fitzgerald's description of love in the jazz age and it
takes upon itself reality, and permanence, and duty discharged with an almost masochistic scrupulousness of honor*
In the bright dreams begins the responsibility which needs so*
much prudence and dominance to sustain; and Fitzgerald
was anything but a prudent man and he tells us that at a certain point in his college career "some old desire for personal
dominance was broken and gone." He connects that loss of
desire for dominance with his ability to write; and he set down
in his notebook the belief that "to record one must be unwary/' Fitzgerald, we may say, seemed to feel that both love
and art needed a sort of personal defenselessness.
The phrase from Yeats, the derivation of the "responsibility" from the "dreams," reminds us that we must guard against
dismissing, with easy words about its immaturity, Fitzgerald's
preoccupation with the bright charm of his youth. Yeats himself, a wiser man and wholly fulfilled in his art, kept to the last
of his old age his connection with his youthful vanity. A
writer's days must be bound each to each by his sense of his
life, and Fitzgerald the undergraduate was father of the best
in the man and the novelist.
J 7 . Scott Fitzgerald 247
His sojourn among the philistines is always much in the
mind of everyone who thinks about Fitzgerald, and indeed it
was always much in his own mind. Everyone knows the famous
exchange between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway Hemingway refers to it in his story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
and Fitzgerald records it in his notebook in which, to Fitzgerald's remark, "The very rich are different from us," Hemingway replied, "Yes, they have more money." It is usually
supposed that Hemingway had the better of the encounter and
quite settled the matter. But we ought not be too sure. The
novelist of a certain kind, if he is to write about social life,
may not brush away the reality of the differences of class, even
though to do so may have the momentary appearance of a
virtuous social avowal. The novel took its rise and its nature
from the radical revision of the class structure in the eighteenth century, and the novelist must still live by his sense of
class differences, and must be absorbed by them, as Fitzgerald
was, even though he despise them, as Fitzgerald did.
No doubt there was a certain ambiguity in Fitzgerald's attitude toward the "very rich"; no doubt they were for him
something more than the mere object of his social observation.
They seem to have been the nearest thing to an aristocracy
that America could offer him, and we cannot be too simple
about what a critic has recently noted, the artist's frequent
"taste for aristocracy, his need often quite open of a superior social class with which he can make some fraction of
common cause enough, at any rate, to account for his own
distinction." Every modern reader is by definition wholly
immune from all ignoble social considerations, and, no matter what his own social establishment or desire for it may be, he
knows that in literature the interest in social position must
never be taken seriously. But not all writers have been so
simple and virtuous what are we to make of those risen
gentlemen, Shakespeare and Dickens, or those fabricators of
the honorific "de," Voltaire and Balzac? Yet their snobbery
248 The Liberal Imagination
let us call it that is of a large and generous kind and we
are not entirely wrong in connecting their peculiar energies
of mind with whatever it was they wanted from gentility or
aristocracy. It is a common habit of writers to envision an actuality of personal life which shall have the freedom and the
richness of detail and the order of form that they desire in
art. Yeats, to mention him again, spoke of the falseness of the
belief that the "inherited glory of the rich" really holds richness of life. This, he said, was a mere dream; and yet, he goes
on, it is a necessary illusion
Yet Homer had not sung
Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
That out of life's own self-delight had sprung
The abounding glittering jet. . . .
And Henry James, at the threshold of his career, allegorized
in his story "Benvolio" the interplay that is necessary for
some artists between their creative asceticism and the bright,
free, gay life of worldliness, noting at the same time the desire
of worldliness to destroy the asceticism. 1
With a man like Goethe the balance between the world and
his asceticism is maintained, and so we forgive him his often
absurd feelings but perhaps absurd as well as forgivable
only in the light of our present opinion of his assured genius
about aristocracy. Fitzgerald could not always keep the
balance true; he was not, as we know, a prudent man. And
no doubt he deceived himself a good deal in his youth, but
certainly his self-deception was not in the interests of vulgarity, for aristocracy meant to him a kind of disciplined distinction of personal existence which, presumably, he was so hum-
ble as not to expect from his art. What was involved in that
notion of distinction can be learned from the use which
i George Moore's comment on JE's having spoken in reproof of Yeats's
pride
in a quite factitious family line is apposite; "JL, who is usually quickwitted,
should have guessed that Yeats's belief in his lineal descent from the
great
Duke of Ormonde was part of his poetic equipment."
F. Scott Fitzgerald 249
Fitzgerald makes of the word "aristocracy" in one of those
serious moments which occur in his most frivolous Saturday
Evening Post stories; he says of the life of the young man of
the story, who during the war was on duty behind the lines,
that "it was not so bad except that when the infantry came
limping back from the trenches he wanted to be one of them.
The sweat and mud they wore seemed only one of those
ineffable symbols of aristocracy that were forever eluding
him." Fitzgerald was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm
the Romantic fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of
personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or
thrown away for, some ideal of self. To us it will no doubt
come more and more to seem a merely boyish dream; the
nature of our society requires the young man to find his
distinction through cooperation, subordination, and an expressed piety of social usefulness, and although a few young
men have made Fitzgerald into a hero of art, it is likely that
even to these admirers the whole nature of his personal fantasy is not comprehensible, for young men find it harder and
harder to understand the youthful heroes of Balzac and Stendhal, they increasingly find reason to blame the boy whose
generosity is bound up with his will and finds its expression
in a large, strict, personal demand upon life.
I am aware that I have involved Fitzgerald with a great
many great names and that it might be felt by some that this
can do him no service, the disproportion being so large. But
the disproportion will seem large only to those who think of
Fitzgerald chiefly through his early public legend of heedlessness.Those who have a clear recollection of the mature
work or who have read The Crack-Up will at least not think
of the disproportion as one of kind. Fitzgerald himself did
not, and it is by a man's estimate of himself that we must
begin to estimate him. For all the engaging self-depreciation
which was part of his peculiarly American charm, he put himself, in all modesty, in the line of greatness, he judged him-
250 The Liberal Imagination
self in a large way. When he writes of his depression, of his
"dark night of the soul" where "it is always three o'clock in
the morning," he not only derives the phrase from St. John of
the Gross but adduces the analogous black despairs of Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. A novel with Ernest Hemingway
as the model of its hero suggests to him Stendhal portraying
the Byronic man, and he defends The Great Gatsby from
some critical remark of Edmund Wilson's by comparing it
with The Brothers Karamazov. Or again, here is the stuff of
his intellectual pride at the very moment that he speaks of
giving it up, as years before he had given up the undergraduate fantasies of valor: "The old dream of being an entire man
in the Goethe-Byron-Shaw tradition . . . has been relegated
to the junk heap of the shoulder pads worn for one day on the
Princeton freshman football field and the overseas cap never
worn overseas." And was it, that old dream, unjustified? To
take but one great name, the one that on first thought seems
the least relevant of all between Goethe at twenty-four the
author of Werther, and Fitzgerald, at twenty-four the author
of This Side of Paradise, there is not really so entire a difference as piety and textbooks might make us think; both the
young men so handsome, both winning immediate and notorious success, both rather more interested in life than in
art, each the spokesman and symbol of his own restless generation.
It is hard to overestimate the benefit which came to Fitzgerald from his having consciously placed himself in the line
of the great He was a "natural," but he did not have the contemporary American novelist's belief that if he compares himself with the past masters, or if he takes thought which, for
a writer, means really knowing what his predecessors have
done he will endanger the integrity of his natural gifts. To
read Fitzgerald's letters to his daughter they are among the
best and most affecting letters I know and to catch the tone
in which he speaks about the literature of the past, or to read
F. Scott Fitzgerald 251
the notebooks he faithfully kept, indexing them as Samuel
Butler had done, and to perceive how continuously he
thought about literature, is to have some clue to the secret of
the continuing power of Fitzgerald's work.
The Great Gatsby, for example, after a quarter-century is
still as fresh as when it first appeared; it has even gained in
weight and relevance, which can be said of very few American books of its time. This, I think, is to be attributed to the
specifically intellectual courage with which it was conceived
and executed, a courage which implies Fitzgerald's grasp
both in the sense of awareness and of appropriation of the
traditional resources available to him. Thus, The Great
Gatsby has its interest as a record of contemporary manners,
but this might only have served to date it, did not Fitzgerald
take the given moment of history as something more than a
mere circumstance, did he not, in the manner of the great
French novelists of the nineteenth century, seize the given
moment as a moral fact. The same boldness of intellectual
grasp accounts for the success of the conception of its hero
Gatsby is said by some to be not quite credible, but the question of any literal credibility he may or may not have becomes trivial before the large significance he implies. For
Gatsby, divided between power and dream, comes inevitably
to stand for America itself. Ours is the only nation that prides
itself upon a dream and gives its name to one, "the American dream." We are told that "the truth was that Jay Gatsby
of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God a phrase which, if it
means anything, means just that and he must be about His
Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty." Clearly it is Fitzgerald's intention that our
mind should turn to the thought of the nation that has sprang
from its "Platonic conception" of itself. To the world it is
anomalous in America, just as in the novel it is anomalous in
Gatsby, that so much raw power should be haunted by en-
252 The Liberal Imagination
visioned romance. Yet in that anomaly lies, for good or bad,
much of the truth of our national life, as, at the present moment, we think about it.
Then, if the book grows in weight of significance with the
years, we can be sure that this could not have happened had
its form and style not been as right as they are. Its form is
ingenious with the ingenuity, however, not of craft but of
intellectual intensity. The form, that is, is not the result of
careful "plotting" the form of a good novel never is but
is rather the result of the necessities of the story's informing
idea, which require the sharpness of radical foreshortening.
Thus, it will be observed, the characters are not "developed":
the wealthy and brutal Tom Buchanan, haunted by his
"scientific" vision of the doom of civilization, the vaguely
guilty, vaguely homosexual Jordan Baker, the dim Wolfsheim,
who fixed the World Series of 1919, are treated, we might
say, as if they were ideographs, a method of economy that is
reinforced by the ideographic use that is made of the Washington Heights flat, the terrible 'Valley of ashes" seen from
the Long Island Railroad, Gatsby's incoherent parties, and
the huge sordid eyes of the oculist's advertising sign. (It is
a technique which gives the novel an affinity with The Waste
Land, between whose author and Fitzgerald there existed a
reciprocal admiration.) Gatsby himself, once stated, grows
only in the understanding of the narrator. He is allowed to
say very little in his own person. Indeed, apart from the famous "Her voice is full of money," he says only one memorable thing, but that remark is overwhelming in its intellectual
audacity: when he is forced to admit that his lost Daisy did
perhaps love her husband, he says, "In any case it was just
personal." With that sentence he achieves an insane greatness, convincing us that he really is a Platonic conception of
himself, really some sort of Son of God.
What underlies all success in poetry, what is even more important than the shape of the poem or its wit of metaphor, is
F. Scott Fitzgerald 253
the poet's voice. It either gives us confidence in what is being
said or it tells us that we do not need to listen; and it carries
both the modulation and the living form of what is being
said. In the novel no less than in the poem, the voice of the
author is the decisive factor. We are less consciously aware of
it in the novel, and, in speaking of the elements of a novel's
art, it cannot properly be exemplified by quotation because
it is continuous and cumulative. In Fitzgerald's work the
voice of his prose is ofjhe essence of his success. We hear in it
at once the tenderness toward human desire that modifies a
true firmness of moral judgment. It is, I would venture to say,
the normal or ideal voice of the novelist. It is characteristically
modest, yet it has in it, without apology or self-consciousness,
a largeness, even a stateliness, which derives from Fitzgerald's
connection with tradition and with mind, from his sense of
what has been done before and the demands which this past
accomplishment makes. "... I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes a fresh
green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees
that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered
in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for
a transitory and enchanted moment man must have held his
breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an
aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired,
face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." Here, in the well-known
passage, the voice is a little dramatic, a little intentional,
which is not improper to a passage in climax and conclusion,
but it will the better suggest in brief compass the habitual
music of Fitzgerald's seriousness.
Fitzgerald lacked prudence, as his heroes did, lacked that
blind instinct of self-protection which the writer needs and
the American writer needs in double measure. But that is
all he lacked and it is the generous fault, even the heroic
fault. He said of his Gatsby, "If personality is an unbroken
254 The Liberal Imagination
series of successful gestures, there was something gorgeous
about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,
as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that
register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability
which is dignified under the name of 'the creative temperament' it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic
readiness such as I have never found in any other person and
which it is not likely I shall ever find again." And it is so that
we are drawn to see Fitzgerald himself as he stands in his
exemplary role.
Art and Fortune
It is impossible to talk about the novel nowadays without having in our minds the question of whether or not the novel is
still a living form. Twenty-five years ago T. S. Eliot said that
the novel came to an end with Flaubert and James, and at
about the same time Sefior Ortega said much the same thing.
This opinion is now heard on all sides. It is heard in conversation rather than read in formal discourse, for to insist
on the death or moribundity of a great genre is an unhappy
task which the critic will naturally avoid if he can, yet the
opinion is now an established one and has a very considerable
authority. Do we not see its influence in, for example, V. S.
Pritchett's recent book, The Living Novell Although Mr.
Pritchett is himself a novelist and writes about the novel with
the perception that comes of love, and even by the name he
gives his book disputes the fact of the novel's death, yet still,
despite these tokens of his faith, he deals with the subject
under a kind of constraint, as if he had won the right to claim
life for the novel only upon condition of not claiming for it
much power.
I do not believe that the novel is dead. And yet particular
forms of the creative imagination may indeed die English
poetic drama stands as the great witness of the possibility
and there might at this time be an advantage in accepting the
proposition as an hypothesis which will lead us to understand
under what conditions the novel may live.
255
256 The Liberal Imagination
If we consent to speak of the novel as dead, three possible
explanations of the fact spring at once to mind. The first is
simply that the genre has been exhausted, worked out in the
way that a lode of ore is worked out it can no longer yield
a valuable supply of its natural matter. The second explanation is that the novel was developed in response to certain
cultural circumstances which now no longer exist but have
given way to other circumstances which must be met by other
forms of the imagination. The third explanation is that al-
though the circumstances to which the novel was a response
do still exist we either lack the power to use the form, 1 or no
longer find value in the answers that the novel provides, because the continuing circumstances have entered a phase of
increased intensity.
The first theory was put forward by Ortega in his essay
''Notes on the Novel." It is an explanation which has its clear
limitations, but it is certainly not without its cogency. We
have all had the experience of feeling that some individual
work of art, or some canon of art, or a whole idiom of art,
has lost, temporarily or permanently, its charm and power.
Sometimes we weary of the habitual or half-mechanical devices by which the artist warms up for his ideas or by which
he bridges the gap between his ideas; this can happen even
with Mozart. Sometimes it is the very essence of the man's
thought that fatigues; we feel that his characteristic insights
can too easily be foreseen and we become too much aware of
how they exist at the expense of blindness to other truths;
this can happen even with Dostoevski. And so with an entire
genre of art there may come a moment when it cannot
satisfy one of our legitimate demands, which is that it shall
surprise us. This demand, and the liability of our artistic interests to wear out, do not show us to be light-minded. With-
i This might seem to beg the cultural question; yet certain technical
abilities
do deteriorate or disappear for reasons which although theoretically
ascertainable are almost beyond practical determination.
Art and Fortune 257
out them our use of art would be only ritualistic, or commemorative of our past experiences; and although there is
nothing wrong in using art for ritual and commemoration,
still these are not the largest uses to which it can be put.
Curiosity is as much an instinct as hunger and love, and
curiosity about any particular thing may be satisfied.
Then we must consider that technique has its autonomy
and that it dictates the laws of its own growth. Aristotle speaks
of Athenian tragedy as seeking and finding its fulfillment, its
entelechy, and it may be that we are interested in any art only
just so long as it is in process of search; that what moves us is
the mysterious energy of quest. At a certain point in the development of a genre, the practitioner looks back and sees
all that has been done by others before him and knows that
no ordinary effort can surpass or even match it; ordinary effort can only repeat. It is at this point that, as Ortega says, we
get the isolated extraordinary effort which transcends the
tradition and brings it to an end. This, no doubt, is what people mean when they speak of Joyce and Proust bringing the
novel to its grave.
Here is the case, as strongly as I can put it, for the idea that
a genre can exhaust itself simply by following the laws of its
own development. As an explanation of the death of the
novel it does not sufficiently exfoliate or sufficiently connect
with the world. It can by no means be ignored, but of itself it
cannot give an adequate answer to our question*
11
So we must now regard the novel as an art form contrived
to do a certain kind of work, its existence conditioned by the
nature of that work. In another essay 2 I undertook to say
what the work of the novel was I said that it was the investigation of reality and illusion. Of course the novel does
2 "Manners, Morals, and the Novel."
258 The Liberal Imagination
not differ in this from all other highly developed literary
forms; it differs, however, in at least one significant respect,
that it deals with reality and illusion in relation to questions
of social class, which in relatively recent times are bound up
with money.
In Western civilization the idea of money exercises a great
fascination it is the fascination of an actual thing which has
attained a metaphysical ideality or of a metaphysical entity
which has attained actual existence. Spirits and ghosts are
beings in such a middling state of existence; and money is
both real and not real, like a spook. We invented money and
we use it, yet we cannot either understand its laws or control
its actions. It has a life of its own which it properly should not
have; Karl Marx speaks with a kind of horror of its indecent
power to reproduce, as if, he says, love were working in its
body. It is impious, being critical of existent social realities,
and it has the effect of lessening their degree of reality. The
social reality upon which it has its most devastating effect is
of course that of class. And class itself is a social fact which,
whenever it is brought into question, has like money a remarkable intimacy with metaphysics and the theory of knowledge I have suggested how for Shakespeare any derangement of social classes seems always to imply a derangement
of the senses in madness or dream, some elaborate joke about
the nature of reality. This great joke is the matter of the
book which we acknowledge as the ancestor of the modern
novel, Don Quixote; and indeed no great novel exists which
does not have the joke at its very heart.
In the essay to which I refer I also said that, in dealing with
the questions of illusion and reality which were raised by the
ideas of money and class, the novel characteristically relied
upon an exhaustive exploitation of manners. Although I
tried to give a sufficiently strong and complicated meaning
to the word manners, I gather that my merely having used
the word, or perhaps my having used it in a context that
Art and Fortune 259
questioned certain political assumptions of a pious sort, has
led to the belief that I am interested in establishing a new
genteel tradition in criticism and fiction. Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make
oneself understood; yet to guard as well as I can against this
imputation, I will say not only that the greatest exploitation
of manners ever made is the Iliad, but also that The Possessed
and Studs Lonigan are works whose concern with manners
is of their very essence.
To these characteristics of the novel the interest in illusion and reality as generated by class and money, this interest
expressed by the observation of manners we must add the
unabashed interest in ideas. From its very beginning the novel
made books the objects of its regard. Nowadays we are inclined to see the appearance of a literary fact in a novel as
the sign of its "intellectuality" and specialness of appeal, and
even as a sign of decadence. But Joyce's solemn literary discussions in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or his
elaborate literary play in the later works, or Proust's critical
excursions, are in the direct line of Don Quixote and Tom
Jones, which are works of literary criticism before they are
anything else. The Germans had a useful name for a certain kind of novel which they called a Kulturroman; actually
every great novel deserves that name, for it is hard to think
of one that is not precisely a romance of culture. By culture
we must mean not merely the general social condition to
which the novel responds but also a particular congeries of
formulated ideas. The great novels, far more often than we
remember, deal explicitly with developed ideas, and although
they vary greatly in the degree of their explicitness they tend
to be more explicit rather than less in addition to the works
already mentioned one can adduce such diverse examples
as Lost Illusions, The Sentimental Education, War and Peace,
Jude the Obscure, and The Brothers Karamazov. Nowadays
the criticism which descends from Eliot puts explicit ideas
260 The Liberal Imagination
in literature at a discount, which is one reason why it is exactly this criticism that is most certain of the death of the
novel, and it has led many of us to forget how in the novel
ideas may be as important as character and as essential to the
given dramatic situation.
This then as I understand it is the nature of the novel
as defined by the work it does. Of these defining conditions
how many are in force today?
I think it is true to say that money and class do not have
the same place in our social and mental life that they once
had. They have certainly not ceased to exist, but certainly
they do not exist as they did in the nineteenth century or
even in our own youth. Money of itself no longer can en-
gage the imagination as it once did; it has lost some of its
impulse, and certainly it is on the defensive; it must compete
on the one hand with the ideal of security and on the other
hand with the ideal of a kind of power which may be more
directly applied. And for many to whom the ideal of mere
security is too low and to whom the ideal of direct political
power is beyond the reach of their imagination, money, in
order to be justified, must be involved with virtue and with
the virtuous cultivation of good taste in politics, culture, and
the appointments of the home money is terribly ashamed
of itself. As for class, in Europe the bourgeoisie together with
its foil the aristocracy has been weakening for decades. It
ceased some time ago to be the chief source of political leaders; its nineteenth-century position as ideologue of the world
has vanished before the ideological strength of totalitarian
communism; the wars have brought it to the point of economic ruin. In England the middle class is in process of liquidating itself. In this country the real basis of the novel has
never existed that is, the tension between a middle class
and an aristocracy which brings manners into observable re-
lief as the living representation of ideals and the living comment on ideas. Our class structure has been extraordinarily
Art and Fortune 261
fluid; our various upper classes have seldom been able or
stable enough to establish their culture as authoritative. With
the single exception of the Civil War, our political struggles
have not had the kind of cultural implications which catch
the imagination, and the extent to which this one conflict has
engaged the American mind suggests how profoundly interesting conflicts of culture may be. (It is possible to say that the
Cromwellian revolution appears in every English novel.) For
the rest, the opposition between rural and urban ideals has
always been rather factitious; and despite a brief attempt to
insist on the opposite view, the conflict of capital and labor
is at present a contest for the possession of the goods of a single
way of life, and not a cultural struggle. Our most fervent in-
terest in manners has been linguistic, and our pleasure in
drawing distinctions between a presumably normal way of
speech and an "accent" or a "dialect" may suggest how simple is our national notion of social difference. 3 And of recent
years, although we grow more passionately desirous of status
and are bitterly haunted by the ghost of every statusconferring ideal, including that of social class, we more and
more incline to show our status-lust not by affirming but by
denying the reality of social difference.
I think that if American novels of the past, whatever their
merits of intensity and beauty, have given us very few sub-
s Lately our official egalitarianism has barred the exploitation of this
interest
by our official arts, the movies and the radio; there may be some social
-wisdom
in this, yet it ignores the fact that at least certain forms and tones of the
mockery of their speech habits are a means by which "extraneous" groups
are ac-
cepted. Mention of this naturally leads to the question of whether the
American attitude toward "minority" groups, particularly Negroes and Jews,
is not
the equivalent of class differentiation. I think it is not, except in a highly
modified way. And for the purposes of the novel it is not the same thing
at all,
for two reasons: it involves no real cultural struggle, no significant
conflict of
ideals, for the excluded group has the same notion of life and the same
aspirations as the excluding group, although the novelist who attempts the
subject
naturally uses the tactic of showing that the excluded group has a
different and
better ethos; and it is impossible to suppose that the novelist who
chooses this
particular subject will be able to muster the satirical ambivalence
toward both
groups which marks the good novel even when it has a social parti pris.
262 The Liberal Imagination
stantial or memorable people, this is because one of the things
which makes for substantiality of character in the novel is
precisely the notation of manners, that is to say, of class traits
modified by personality. It is impossible to imagine a Silas
Wegg or a Smerdyakov or a Felicite (of A Simple Heart) or
a Mrs. Proudie without the full documentation of their behavior in relation to their own class and to other classes. All
great characters exist in part by reason of the ideas they represent. The great characters of American fiction, such, say, as
Captain Ahab and Natty Bumppo, tend to be mythic because of the rare fineness and abstractness of the ideas they
represent; and their very freedom from class gives them a
large and glowing generality; for what I have called substantiality is not the only quality that makes a character great.
They are few in number and special in kind; and American
fiction has nothing to show like the huge, swarming, substantial population of the European novel, the substantiality of
which is precisely a product of a class existence. In fiction, as
perhaps in life, the conscious realization of social class, which
is an idea of great power and complexity, easily and quickly
produces intention, passion, thought, and what I am calling
substantiality. The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the
practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in
their difference and specialness.
Then we must be aware of how great has been the fallingoff in the energy of ideas that once animated fiction. In the
nineteenth century the novel followed the great lines of political thought, both the conservative and the radical, and it
documented politics with an original and brilliant sociology.
In addition, it developed its own line of psychological discovery, which had its issue in the monumental work of Freud.
But now there is no conservative tradition and no radical
tradition of political thought, and not even an eclecticism
which is in the slightest degree touched by the imagination;
Art and Fortune 263
we are in the hands of the commentator. On the continent of
Europe political choice may be possible but political thought
is not, and in a far more benign context the same may be
said of England. And in the United States, although for different reasons, there is a similar lack of political intelligence:
all over the world the political mind lies passive before action
and the event. In psychological thought we find a strange
concerted effort of regression from psychoanalysis, such as the
reformulations of the analytical psychology which Dr. Horney
and Dr. Sullivan make in the name of reason and society and
progress, which are marked by the most astonishing weakness
of mind, and which appeal to the liberal intellectual by an
exploitation of the liberal intellectual's fond belief that he
suspects "orthodoxy." Nor really can it be said that Freudian
psychology itself has of late made any significant advances.
This weakness of our general intellectual life is reflected
in our novels. So far as the novel touches social and political
questions it permits itself to choose only between a cheery
or a sour democratism; it is questionable whether any American novel since Babbitt has told us a new thing about our
social life. In psychology the novel relies either on a mechanical or a clinical use of psychiatry or on the insights that were
established by the novelists of fifty years ago.
It is not then unreasonable to suppose that we are at the
close of a cultural cycle, that the historical circumstances
which called forth the particular intellectual effort in which
we once lived and moved and had our being is now at an
end, and that the novel as part of that effort is as deciduous
as the rest.
in
But there is an explanation of the death of the novel which
is both corollary and alternative to this. Consider a main intellectual preoccupation of the period that ends with Freud
264 The Liberal Imagination
and begins with Swift or with Shakespeare's middle period or
with Montaigne it does not matter just where we set the
beginning so long as we start with some typical and impressive representation, secular and not religious, of man's depravity and weakness. Freud said of his own theories that
they appealed to him as acting, like the theories of Darwin
and Copernicus, to diminish man's pride, and this intention,
carried out by means of the discovery and demonstration of
man's depravity, has been one of the chief works of the human mind for some four hundred years. What the mind was
likely to discover in this period was by and large much the
same thing, yet mind was always active in the enterprise of
discovery; discovery itself was a kind of joy and sometimes a
hope, no matter how great the depravity that was turned up;
the activity of the mind was a kind of fortitude. Then too
there was reassurance in the resistance that was offered to the
assaults of mind upon the strong texture of the social facade
of humanity. That part of the mind which delights in discovery was permitted its delight by the margin that existed
between speculation and proof; had the mind been able
fully to prove what it believed, it would have fainted and
failed before its own demonstration, but so strongly entrenched were the forces of respectable optimism and the
belief in human and social goodness that the demonstration
could never be finally established but had to be attempted
over and over again. Now, however, the old margin no longer
exists; the facade is down; society's resistance to the discovery
of depravity has ceased; now everyone knows that Thackeray
was wrong, Swift right. The world and the soul have split
open of themselves and are all agape for our revolted inspection. The simple eye of the camera shows us, at Belsen and
Buchenwald, horrors that quite surpass Swift's powers, a vision of life turned back to its corrupted elements which is
more disgusting than any that Shakespeare could contrive,
Art and Fortune 265
a cannibalism more literal and fantastic than that which
Montaigne ascribed to organized society. A characteristic activity of mind is therefore no longer needed. Indeed, before
what we now know the mind stops; the great psychological
fact of our time which we all observe with baffled wonder
and shame is that there is no possible way of responding to
Belsen and Buchenwald. The activity of mind fails before
the incomrnunicability of man's suffering.
This may help to explain the general deterioration
of our intellectual life. It may also help to explain an attitude to our life in general. Twenty-five years ago Ortega
spoke of the "dehumanization" of modern art. Much of what
he said about the nature of modern art has, by modern art,
been proved wrong, or was wrong even when he said it. But
Ortega was right in observing of modern art that it expresses
a dislike of holding in the mind the human fact and the
human condition, that it shows "a real loathing of living
forms and living beings," a disgust with the "rounded and
soft forms of living bodies"; and that together with this revulsion, or expressed by it, we find a disgust with history and
society and the state. Human life as an aesthetic object can
perhaps no longer command our best attention; the day
seems to have gone when the artist who dealt in representation could catch our interest almost by the mere listing of
the ordinary details of human existence; and the most extreme and complex of human dilemmas now surely seem to
many to have lost their power to engage us. This seems to
be supported by evidence from those arts for which a conscious exaltation of humanistic values is stock-in-trade I
mean advertising and our middling novels, which, almost in
the degree that they celebrate the human, falsify and abstract
it; in the very business of expressing adoration of the rounded
and soft forms of living bodies they expose the disgust which
they really feel.
266 The Liberal Imagination
IV
At this point we are in the full tide of those desperate perceptions of our life which are current nowadays among thinking and talking people, which even when we are not thinking
and talking haunt and control our minds with visions of
losses worse than that of existence losses of civilization, personality, humanness. They sink our spirits not merely because they are terrible and possible but because they have
become so obvious and cliche that they seem to close for us
the possibility of thought and imagination.
And at this point too we must see that if the novel is dead
or dying, it is not alone in its mortality. The novel is a kind
of summary and paradigm of our cultural life, which is perhaps why we speak sooner of its death than of the death of
any other form of thought. It has been of all literary forms
the most devoted to the celebration and investigation of the
human will; and the will of our society is dying of its own
excess. The religious will, the political will, the sexual will,
the artistic will each is dying of its own excess. The novel
at its greatest is the record of the will acting under the direction of an idea, often an idea of will itself. All else in the
novel is but secondary, and those examples which do not deal
with the will in action are but secondary in their genre. Sensibility in the novel is but notation and documentation of the
will in action. Again Don Quixote gives us our first instance.
In its hero we have the modern conception of the will in a
kind of wry ideality. Flaubert said that Emma Bovary was
Quixote's sister, and in her we have the modern will in a kind
of corruption. Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse and
Jane Eyre are similarly related to all the Karamazovs, to
Stavrogin, and to that Kirillov who was led by awareness of
the will to assert it ultimately by destroying it in himself
with a pistol shot.
Art and Fortune 267
Surely the great work of our time Is the restoration and the
reconstitution of the will. I know that with some the opinion
prevails that, apart from what very well may happen by way
of Apocalypse, what should happen is that we advance farther
and farther into the darkness, seeing to it that the will finally
exhausts and expends itself to the end that we purge our
minds of all the old ways of thought and feeling, giving up
all hope of ever reconstituting the great former will of humanism, which, as they imply, has brought us to this pass. One
must always listen when this opinion is offered in true passion. But for the vision and ideal of apocalyptic renovation
one must be either a particular kind of moral genius with
an attachment to life that goes beyond attachment to any particular form of life D. H. Lawrence was such a genius or
a person deficient in attachment to life in any of its forms.
Most of us are neither one nor the other, and our notions of
renovation and reconstitution are social and pragmatic and
in the literal sense of the word conservative. To the restoration and reconstitution of the will thus understood the novelistic intelligence is most apt.
When I try to say on what grounds I hold this belief, my
mind turns to a passage in Henry James's preface to The
American. James has raised the question of "reality" and
"romance," and he remarks that "of the men of largest resounding imagination before the human scene, of Scott, of
Balzac, even of the coarse, comprehensive, prodigious Zola,
we feel, I think, that the reflexion toward either quarter has
never taken place'*; they have never, that is, exclusively committed themselves either to "reality" or to "romance" but
have maintained an equal commerce with both. And this,
James goes on to say, is the secret of their power with us. Then
follows an attempt to distinguish between "reality" and "romance," which defines "reality" as "the things we cannot possibly not know," and then gives us this sentence: "The romantic stands ... for the things that, with all the facilities
268 The Liberal Imagination
in the world, all the wealth and all the courage and all the
wit and all the adventure, we never can directly know; the
things that can reach us only through the beautiful circuit of
thought and desire."
The sentence is perhaps not wholly perspicuous, yet, if I
understand it at all, it points to the essential moral nature of
the novel. Julien Sorel eventually acquired all the facilities
in the world; he used "all the wealth and all the courage
and all the wit and all the adventure" to gain the things that
are to be gained by their means; what he gained was ashes in
his mouth. But what in the end he gained came to him in
prison not by means of the "facilities" but through the beautiful circuit of thought and desire, and it impelled him to
make his great speech to the Besan^on jury in which he threw
away his life; his happiness and his heroism came, I think,
from his will having exhausted all that part of itself which
naturally turns to the inferior objects offered by the social
world and from its having learned to exist in the strength of
its own knowledge of its thought and desire. I have said that
awareness of the will in its beautiful circuit of thought and
desire was the peculiar property of the novel, yet in point of
fact we find it long before the novel came into existence and
in a place where it always surprises us, in the Inferno, at the
meetings of Dante with Paolo and Francesca, with Brunetto
Latini and with Ulysses, the souls who keep the energy of
thought and desire alive and who are therefore forever loved
however damned. For James the objects of this peculiarly
human energy go by the name of "romance." The word is a
risky one and therefore it is necessary to say that it does not
stand for the unknowable, for what is vulgarly called "the
ideal," let alone for that which is pleasant and charming because far off. It stands for the world of unfolding possibility,
for that which, when brought to actuality, is powerfully operative. It is thus a synonym for the will in its creative aspect,
especially in its aspect of moral creativeness, as it subjects
Art and Fortune 269
itself to criticism and conceives for itself new states of being.
The novel has had a long dream of virtue in which the will,
while never abating its strength and activity, learns to refuse
to exercise itself upon the unworthy objects with which the
social world tempts it, and either conceives its own right objects or becomes content with its own sense of its potential
force which is why so many novels give us, before their end,
some representation, often crude enough, of the will unbroken but in stasis.
It is the element of what James calls "romance," this operative reality of thought and desire, which, in the novel, exists side by side with the things "we cannot possibly not
know/' that suggests to me the novel's reconstitutive and
renovating power.
If there is any ground or my belief that the novel can, by
reason of one of its traditional elements, do something in the
work^of reconstituting and renovating the will, there may
be some point in trying to say under what particular circumstances of its own nature and action it may best succeed.
I think it will not succeed if it accepts the latest-advanced
theory of the novel, Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of "dogmatic
realism/ 7 According to the method of this theory, the novel is
to be written as if without an author and without a personal
voice and "without the foolish business of storytelling." The
reader is to be subjected to situations as nearly equivalent as
possible to those of life itself; he is to be prevented from falling out of the book, kept as strictly as possible within its
confines and power by every possible means, even by so literal a means as the closest approximation of fictional to historical time, for the introduction of large periods of time
would permit the reader to remember that he is involved in
270 The Liberal Imagination
an illusion; he is, in short, to be made to forget that he is
reading a book. We all know the devices by which the sensations of actual life, such as claustrophobia and fatigue, are
generated in the reader; and although the novels which succeed in the use of these devices have had certain good effects,
they have had bad effects too. By good and bad effects I mean,
as Sartre means, good and bad social effects. The banishment
of the author from his books, the stilling of his voice, have
but reinforced the faceless hostility of the world and have
tended to teach us that we ourselves are not creative agents
and that we have no voice, no tone, no style, no significant
existence. Surely what we need is the opposite of this, the
opportunity to identify ourselves with a mind that willingly
admits that it is a mind and does not pretend that it is History or Events or the World but only a mind thinking and
planning possibly planning our escape.
There is not very much that is actually original in Sartre's
theory, which seems to derive from Flaubert at a not very
great remove. Flaubert himself never could, despite his own
theory, keep himself out of his books; we always know who
is there by guessing who it is that is kept out it makes a
great difference just which author is kept out of a novel, and
Flaubert's absence occupies more room than Sartre's, and is
a much more various and impressive thing. And Flaubert's
mind, in or out of his novels, presents itself to us as an ally
although, as I more and more come to think, the alliance it
offers is dangerous.
As for what Sartre calls "the foolish business of storytelling," I believe that, so far from giving it up, the novel will
have to insist on it more and more. It is exactly the story that
carries what James calls "romance," which is what the theologians call "faith/' and in the engaged and working literature which Sartre rightly asks for this is an essential element.
To know a story when we see one, to know it /or a story, to
know that it is not reality itself but that it has clear and effec-
An and Fortune
tive relations with reality this is one of the great disciplines
of the mind.
In speaking against the ideal of the authorless novel I am
not, of course, speaking in behalf of the "personality" of the
author consciously displayed nothing could be more frivolous but only in behalf of the liberating effects that may be
achieved when literature understands itself to be literature
and does not identify itself with what it surveys. (This is as
intellectually necessary as for science not to represent itself as
a literal picture of the universe.) The authorial minds that in
Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy play with events and the
reader in so nearly divine a way become the great and strangely
effective symbols of liberty operating in the world of necessity,
and this is more or less true of all the novelists who contrive
and invent.
Yet when I speak in defense of the salutary play of the mind
in the controlled fantasy of storytelling I am not defending
the works of consciously literary, elaborately styled fantasy
in the manner of, let us say, Nightwood y which in their own
way subscribe to the principles of Sartre's dogmatic realism,
for although the conscious literary intention of the author is
always before us, yet style itself achieves the claustral effect
which Sartre would manage by the representation of events.
Mr. Eliot praises the prose of Nightwood for having so much
affinity with poetry. This is not a virtue, and I believe that it
will not be mistaken for a virtue by any novel of the near
future which will interest us. The loss of a natural prose, one
which has at least a seeming affinity with good common speech,
has often been noted. It seems to me that the observation of
the loss has been too complacently made and that its explanations, while ingenious, have had the intention of preventing
it from being repaired in kind. A prose which approaches
poetry has no doubt its own value, but it cannot serve to repair
the loss of a straightforward prose, rapid, masculine, and committed to events, making its effects not by the single word or
The Liberal Imagination
by the phrase but by words properly and naturally massed. I
conceive that the creation of such a prose should be one of the
conscious intentions of any novelist. 4
And as a corollary to my rejection of poetic prose for the
novel, I would suggest that the novelist of the next decades
will not occupy himself with questions of form. The admitted
weakness of the contemporary novel, the far greater strength
of poetry, the current strong interest in the theory of poetry,
have created a situation in which the canons of poetical perfection are quite naturally but too literally applied to the
novel. These canons have not so much reinforced as displaced
the formal considerations of Flaubert and James, which have
their own dangers but which were at least conceived for the
novel itself. I make every expectable disclaimer of wishing to
depreciate form and then go on to say that a conscious preoccupation with form at the present time is almost certain to
lead the novelist, particularly the young novelist, into limitation. The notions of form which are at present current among
even those who are highly trained in literature let alone
among the semi-literary, who are always very strict about enforcing the advanced ideas of forty years ago are all too
simple and often seem to come down to nothing more than the
form of the sonata, the return on the circle with appropriate
repetitions of theme. For the modern highly trained literary
sensibility, form suggests completeness and the ends tucked
in; resolution is seen only as all contradictions equated, and
* The question of prose is as important as that of prosody and we never
pay
enough attention to it in criticism. I am far from thinking that my brief
paragraph even opens the subject adequately. The example of Joyce has
been urged
against the little I have just said. It seems to me that whenever the
prose of
A Portrait of the Artist becomes what we call poetic, it is in a very false
taste;
this has been defended as being a dramatic device, an irony against the
hero.
Ulysses may be taken as making a strong case against my own
preference, yet
I think that its basic prose, which is variously manipulated, is not
without its
affinities with the prose I ask for. The medium of Finnegans Wake may,
without prejudice, be said to be something other than prose in any
traditional
sense; if it should establish a tradition it will also establish new criteria
and
problems.
Art and Fortune 273
although form thus understood has its manifest charm, it will
not adequately serve the modern experience. A story, like the
natural course of an emotion, has its own form, and I take it
as the sign of our inadequate trust of story and of our exaggerated interest in sensibility that we have begun to insist on
the precise ordering of the novel.
Then I venture the prediction that the novel of the next
decades will deal in a very explicit way with ideas. The objections to this will be immediate. Everybody quotes Mr.
Eliot's remark about Henry James having a mind so fine that
no idea could violate it, which suggests an odd, violent notion
of the relation of minds and ideas, not at all the notion that
James himself held; and everybody knows the passage in which
Mr. Eliot insists on the indifferent connection which Dante
and Shakespeare had with the intellectual formulations of
their respective times. I think I can understand and sympathetically as well as sociologically Mr. Eliot's feeling for a
mode of being in which the act and tone of ideation are not
dominant, just as I can understand something of the admiration which may be felt for a society such as Yeats celebrated,
which expresses its sense of life not by means of words but by
means of houses and horses and by means of violence, manners, courage, and death. But I do not understand what Mr.
Eliot means when he makes a sharp distinction between ideas
and emotions in literature; I think that Plato was right when
in The Symposium he represented ideas as continuous with
emotions, both springing from the appetites.
It is a prevailing notion that a novel which contains or deals
with ideas is bound to be pallid and abstract and intellectual.
As against this belief here is an opinion from the great day of
the novelr/'There are active souls who like rapidity, movement, conciseness, sudden shocks, action, drama, who avoid
discussion, who have little fondness for meditation and take
pleasure in results. From such people comes what I should call
the Literature of Ideas." This odd definition, whose seeming
274 The Liberal Imagination
contradictions we will not pause over, was made by Balzac in
the course of his long review of The Charterhouse of Parma,
and it is Stendhal whom Balzac mentions as the great exemplar
of the literature of ideas. And we know what ideas are at work
in The Charterhouse and The Red and the Black: they are
the ideas of Rousseau and they are named as such. These ideas
are not to be separated from the passions of Julien and Fabrice;
they are reciprocally expressive of each other. To us it is
strange that ideas should be expressed so, and also in terms of
prisons and rope ladders, pistols and daggers. It should not
seem strange, for it is in the nature of ideas to be so expressed.
Yet although these two great examples support much of my
view of the place of ideas in the novel, they do not support all
of it. They make for me the point of the continuity of ideas
and emotions, which in our literary context is forgotten. And
they remind us forcibly of the ideological nature of institutions and classes. But in Stendhal's novels the ideas, although
precisely identified, are chiefly represented by character and
dramatic action, and although this form of representation has
of course very high aesthetic advantages, yet I would claim for
the novel the right and the necessity to deal with ideas by
means other than that of the "objective correlative," to deal
with them as directly as it deals with people or terrain or social
setting.
There is an obvious social fact which supports this claim.
No one who is in the least aware of our social life today can
miss seeing that ideas have acquired a new kind of place in
society. Nowadays everyone is involved in ideas or, to be
more accurate, in ideology. The impulse of novelists, which
has been much decried, to make their heroes intellectuals of
some sort was, however dull it became, perfectly sound: they
wanted people of whom it was clear that ideas were an important condition of their lives. But this limitation to avowed
intellectuals is no longer needed; in our society the simplest
person is involved with ideas. Every person we meet in the
Art and Fortune 275
course of our daily life, no matter how unlettered he may be,
is groping with sentences toward a sense of his life and his
position in it; and he has what almost always goes with an impulse to ideology, a good deal of animus and anger. What
would so much have pleased the social philosophers of an
earlier time has come to pass ideological organization has cut
across class organization, generating loyalties and animosities
which are perhaps even more intense than those of class. The
increase of conscious formulation, the increase of a certain
kind of consciousness by formulation, makes a fact of modern
life which is never sufficiently estimated. This is a condition
which has been long in developing, for it began with the movements of religious separatism; now politics, and not only
politics but the requirements of a whole culture, make verbal
and articulate the motive of every human act: we eat by reason,
copulate by statistics, rear children by rule, and the one impulse we do not regard with critical caution is that toward
ideation, which increasingly becomes a basis of prestige.
This presents the novel with both an opportunity and a
duty. The opportunity is a subject matter. Social class and the
conflicts it produces may not be any longer a compelling subject to the novelist, but the organization of society into ideological groups presents a subject scarcely less absorbing. Ideological society has, it seems to me, nearly as full a range of
passion and nearly as complex a system of manners as a society
based on social class. Its promise of comedy and tragedy is
enormous; its assurance of relevance is perfect. Dostoevski
adequately demonstrated this for us, but we never had in this
country a sufficiently complex ideological situation to support
it in our own practice of the novel. We have it now.
This opportunity of the novel clearly leads to its duty. Ideology is not ideas; ideology is not acquired by thought but by
breathing the haunted air. The life in ideology, from which
none of us can wholly escape, is a strange submerged life of
habit and semihabit in which to ideas we attach strong pas-
276 The Liberal Imagination
sions but no very clear awareness of the concrete reality of
their consequences. To live the life of ideology with its special
form of unconsciousness is to expose oneself to the risk of becoming an agent of what Kant called "the Radical Evil,"
which is "man's inclination to corrupt the imperatives of
morality so that they may become a screen for the expression
of self-love/' 5 But the novel is a genre with a very close and
really a very simple relation to actuality, to the things we cannot possibly not know not if they are pointed out to us; it is
the form in which the things we cannot possibly not know live
side by side with thought and desire, both in their true and
beautiful state and in their corrupt state; it is the form which
provides the perfect criticism of ideas by attaching them to
their appropriate actuality. No less than in its infancy, and
now perhaps with a greater urgency and relevance, the novel
passionately concerns itself with reality, with appearance and
reality.
VI
But I must not end on a note so high it would falsify my
present intention and my whole feeling about the novel. To
speak now of "duty" and, as I earlier did, of the work the novel
may do in the reconstitution and renovation of the will, to formulate a function and a destiny for the novel, is to put it into
a compromised position where it has been far too long already.
The novel was better off when it was more humbly conceived
than it is now; the novelist was in a far more advantageous
position when his occupation was misprized, or when it was
estimated by simpler minds than his own, when he was nearly
alone in his sense of wonder at the possibilities of his genre, at
s Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. I, p. 120: "
'This
evil is radical/ [Kant] declares, 'because it corrupts the very basis of all
maxims.'
In analyzing the human capacity for self-deception and its ability to
make the
worse appear the better reason for the sake of providing a moral
fagade for
selfish actions, Kant penetrates into spiritual intricacies and mysteries
to which
he seems to remain completely blind in his Critique of Practical
Reason/'
Art and Fortune 277
the great effects it might be made to yield. The novel was
luckier when it had to compete with the sermon, with works
of history, with philosophy and poetry and with the ancient
classics, when its social position was in question and like one
of its own poor or foundling or simple heroes it had to make
its way against odds. Whatever high intentions it may have
had, it was permitted to stay close to its own primitive elements
from which it drew power. Believing this, I do not wish to
join in the concerted effort of contemporary criticism to increase the superego of the novel, to conspire with our sense
of cultural crisis to heap responsibilities upon it, to hedge it
about with prescribed functions and spiked criteria; as things
are, the novel feels quite guilty enough.
A sentence in Aristotle's Ethics has always been memorable,
perhaps because I have never wholly understood it. Aristotle
says, "There is a sense in which Chance and Art have the same
sphere; as Agathon says, 'Art fosters Fortune; Fortune fosters
Art/ " Taken out of its context, and merely as a gnomic sentence, this says much. It says something about the reciprocation which in the act of composition exists between form and
free invention, each making the other, which even the most
considerate criticism can never really be aware of and often
belies. Fortune fosters Art: there is indeed something fortuitous in all art, and in the novel the element of the fortuitous
is especially large. The novel achieves its best effects of art
often when it has no concern with them, when it is fixed upon
effects in morality, or when it is simply reporting what it conceives to be objective fact. The converse is of course also true,
that the novel makes some of its best moral discoveries or
presentations of fact when it is concerned with form, when it
manipulates its material merely in accordance with some
notion of order or beauty, although it must be stipulated that
this is likely to occur only when what is manipulated resists
enough, the novel being the form whose aesthetic must pay an
unusually large and simple respect to its chosen material. This
278 The Liberal Imagination
predominance of fortuitousness in the novel accounts for the
roughness of grain, even the coarseness of grain as compared
with other arts, that runs through it. The novel is, as many
have said of it, the least "artistic" of genres. For this it pays its
penalty and it has become in part the grave as well as the
monument of many great spirits who too carelessly have entrusted their talents to it. Yet the headlong, profuse, often
careless quality of the novel, though no doubt wasteful, is an
aspect of its bold and immediate grasp on life.
But from this very sense of its immediacy to life we have
come to overvalue the novel. We have, for example, out of
awareness of its power, demanded that it change the world;
no genre has ever had so great a burden of social requirement
put upon it (which, incidentally, it has very effectively discharged), or has been so strictly ordered to give up, in the fulfillment of its assigned function, all that was unconscious and
ambivalent and playful in itself. Our sense of its comprehensiveness and effectiveness have led us to make a legend of it:
one of the dreams of a younger America, continuing until
recently, was of the Great American Novel, which was always
imagined to be as solitary and omniseminous as the Great
White Whale. Then we have subjected it to criteria which are
irrelevant to its nature how many of us happily share the
horror which John Gould Fletcher expressed at the discovery
that Trollope thought of novel-writing as a trade. The overvaluation of love is the beginning of the end of love; the overvaluation of art is the beginning of the end of art.
What I have called the roughness of grain of the novel, and
praised as such, corresponds with something in the nature of
the novelists themselves. Of all practitioners of literature,
novelists as a class have made the most aggressive assault upon
the world, the most personal demand upon it, and no matter
how obediently they have listened to their daemons they have
kept an ear cocked at the crowd and have denounced its dullness in not responding with gifts of power and fame. This
Art and Fortune 279
personal demand the haughtiest reserve o Flaubert and James
did not try to hide. The novelists have wanted much and very
openly; and with great simplicity and naivete they have mixed
what they personally desired with what they desired for the
world and have mingled their mundane needs with their
largest judgments. Then, great as their mental force has been,
they have been touched with something like stupidity, resembling the holy stupidity which Pascal recommends: its effects
appear in their ability to maintain ambivalence toward their,
society, which is not an acquired attitude of mind, or a weakness of mind, but rather the translation of a biological datum,
an extension of the pleasure-pain with which, in a healthy
state, we respond to tension and effort; the novelist expresses
this in his coexistent hatred and love of the life he observes.
His inconsistency of intellectual judgment is biological wisdom.
It is at this point that I must deal with a lapse in my argument of which I am aware. My statement of belief that the
novel is not dead, together with what I have said about what
the novel should or should not do, very likely does not weigh
against those circumstances in our civilization which I have
adduced as accounting for the hypothetical death of the novel.
To me certainly these circumstances are very real. And as I
describe the character of the novelist they inevitably occur
to me again. For it is exactly that character and what it suggests in a culture that the terrible circumstances of our time
destroy. The novelist's assertion of personal demand and his
frank mingling of the mundane and personal with the high
and general, his holy stupidity, or as Keats called it, "negative
capability/' which is his animal faith can these persist
against the assaults which the world now makes on them? If the
novel cannot indeed survive without ambivalence, does what
the world presents us with any longer permit ambivalence?
The novelist could once speak of the beautiful circuit of
thought and desire which exists beside the daily reality, but
280 The Liberal Imagination
the question is now whether thought and desire have any
longer a field of possibility. No answer can soon be forthcoming. Yet, "as Agathon says, 'Art fosters Fortune; Fortune fosters
Art/ " There is both an affirmation and an abdication in that
sentence; the abdication is as courageous as the affirmation,
and the two together make up a good deal of wisdom. If anything of the old novelistic character survives into our day, the
novelist will be sufficiently aware of Fortune, of Conditions,
of History, for he is, as Fielding said, the historian's heir; but
he will also be indifferent to History, sharing the vital stupidity of the World-Historical Figure, who of course is not in
the least interested in History but only in his own demands
upon life and thus does not succumb to History's most malign
and subtle trick, which is to fix and fascinate the mind of men
with the pride of their foreknowledge of doom. There are
times when, as the method of Perseus with the Medusa suggests, you do well not to look straight at what you are dealing
with but rather to see it in the mirror-shield that the hero carried. Which is to say, "Art fosters Fortune."
But the shrug which is implied by the other half of the sentence is no less courageous. It does not suggest that we compare
our position with what appears to be the more favored situation of the past, or keep in mind how History has robbed the
novelist of a great role. What a demand upon the guarantees
of History this would imply! What an overvaluation of security, and of success and the career, and of art, and of life itself,
which must always be a little undervalued if it is to be lived.
Rather should the phrase suggest both the fortuitous and the
gratuitous nature of art, how it exists beyond the reach of the
will alone, how it is freely given and not always for good rea-
son, and for as little reason taken away. It is not to be demanded or prescribed or provided for. The understanding of
this cannot of itself assure the existence of the novel but it
helps toward establishing the state of the soul in which the
novel becomes possible.
The Meaning of a Literary Idea
. . . Though no great minist'ring reason sorts
Out the dark mysteries of human souls
To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls
A vast idea before me, and I glean
Therefrom my liberty . . .
Keats: "Sleep and Poetry"
The question of the relation which should properly obtain
between what we call creative literature and what we call ideas
is a matter of insistent importance for modern criticism. It did
not always make difficulties for the critic, and that it now
makes so many is a fact which tells us much about our present
relation to literature.
Ever since men began to think about poetry, they have conceived that there is a difference between the poet and the
philosopher, a difference in method and in intention and in
result. These differences I have no wish to deny. But a solidly
established difference inevitably draws the fire of our question; it tempts us to inquire whether it is really essential or
whether it is quite so settled and extreme as at first it seems.
To this temptation I yield perhaps too easily, and very possibly as the result of an impercipience on my part it may be
that I see the difference with insufficient sharpness because I
Note: This essay was read at the Conference in American Literature at
the
University of Rochester, February 1949, and first published in the
American
Quarterly f Fall 1949.
281
282 The Liberal Imagination
do not have a proper notion either of the matter of. poetry or
of the matter of philosophy. But whatever the reason, when I
consider the respective products of the poetic and of the philosophic mind, although I see that they are by no means the
same and although I can conceive that different processes,
even different mental faculties, were at work to make them
and to make them different, I cannot resist the impulse to put
stress on their similarity and on their easy assimilation to each
other.
Let me suggest some of the ways in which literature, by its
very nature, is involved with ideas. I can be quite brief because
what I say will not be new to you.
The most elementary thing to observe is that literature is of
its nature involved with ideas because it deals with man in
society, which is to say that it deals with formulations, valuations, and decisions, some of them implicit, others explicit.
Every sentient organism acts on the principle that pleasure is
to be preferred to pain, but man is the sole creature who
formulates or exemplifies this as an idea and causes it to lead
to other ideas. His consciousness of self abstracts this principle
of action from his behavior and makes it the beginning of a
process of intellection or a matter for tears and laughter. And
this is but one of the innumerable assumptions or ideas that
are the very stuff of literature.
This is self-evident and no one ever thinks of denying it. All
that is ever denied is that literature is within its proper function in bringing these ideas to explicit consciousness, or ever
gains by doing so. Thus, one of the matters of assumption in
any society is the worth of men as compared with the worth of
women; upon just such an assumption, more or less settled,
much of the action of the Oresteia is based, and we don't in the
least question the propriety of this or not until it becomes
the subject of open debate between Apollo and Athene, who,
on the basis of an elaborate biological speculation, try to
decide which is the less culpable, to kill your father or to kill
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 283
your mother. At this point we, in our modern way, feel that
in permitting the debate Aeschylus has made a great and rather
silly mistake, that he has for the moment ceased to be literary.
Yet what drama does not consist of the opposition of formulable ideas, what drama, indeed, is not likely to break into the
explicit exposition and debate of these ideas?
This, as I say, is elementary. And scarcely less elementary is
the observation that whenever we put two emotions into juxtaposition we have what we can properly call an idea. When
Keats brings together, as he so often does, his emotions about
love and his emotions about death, we have a very powerful
idea and the source of consequent ideas. The force of such an
idea depends upon the force of the two emotions which are
brought to confront each other, and also, of course, upon the
way the confrontation is contrived.
Then it can be said that the very form of a literary work,
considered apart from its content, so far as that is possible, is
in itself an idea. Whether we deal with syllogisms or poems,
we deal with dialectic with, that is, a developing series of
statements. Or if the word "statements" seems to pre-judge
the question so far as literature is concerned, let us say merely
that we deal with a developing series the important word is
"developing." We judge the value of the development by
judging the interest of its several stages and the propriety and
the relevance of their connection among themselves. We make
the judgment in terms of the implied purpose of the developing series.
Dialectic, in this sense, is just another word for form, and
has for its purpose, in philosophy or in art, the leading of the
mind to some conclusion. Greek drama, for example, is an
arrangement of moral and emotional elements in such a way
as to conduct the mind "inevitably," as we like to say to a
certain affective condition. This condition is a quality of personal being which may be judged by the action it can be
thought ultimately to lead to.
284 The Liberal Imagination
We take Aristotle to be a better critic of the drama than
Plato because we perceive that Aristotle understood and Plato
did not understand that the form of the drama was of itself an
idea which controlled and brought to a particular issue the
subordinate ideas it contained. The form of the drama is its
idea, and its idea is its form. And form in those arts which we
call abstract is no less an idea than is form in the representational arts. Governments nowadays are very simple and accurate in their perception of this much more simple and
accurate than are academic critics and aestheticians and they
are as quick to deal with the arts of "pure" form as they are to
deal with ideas stated in discourse: it is as if totalitarian
governments kept in mind what the rest of us tend to forget,
that "idea" in one of its early significations exactly means form
and was so used by many philosophers.
It is helpful to have this meaning before us when we come
to consider that particular connection between literature and
ideas which presents us with the greatest difficulty, the connection that involves highly elaborated ideas, or ideas as we
have them in highly elaborated systems such as philosophy, or
theology, or science. The modern feeling about this relation-
ship is defined by two texts, both provided by T. S. Eliot. In
his essay on Shakespeare Mr. Eliot says, "I can see no reason
for believing that either Dante or Shakespeare did any thinking on his own. The people who think that Shakespeare
thought are always people who are not engaged in writing
poetry, but who are engaged in thinking, and we all like to
think that great men were like ourselves." And in his essay on
Henry James Mr. Eliot makes the well-known remark that
James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.
In both statements, as I believe, Mr. Eliot permits his impulse to spirited phrase to run away with him, yielding too
much to what he conceives to be the didactic necessities of the
moment, for he has it in mind to offer resistance to the
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 285
nineteenth-century way of looking at poetry as a heuristic
medium, as a communication of knowledge. This is a view
which is well exemplified in a sentence of Carlyle's: "If called
to define Shakespeare's faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all in that." As between the
two statements about Shakespeare's mental processes, I give
my suffrage to Carlyle's as representing a more intelligible
and a more available notion of intellect than Mr. Eliot's, but
I think I understand what Mr. Eliot is trying to do with his
he is trying to rescue poetry from the kind of misinterpretation of Carlyle's view which was once more common than it
is now; he is trying to save for poetry what is peculiar to it, and
for systematic thought what is peculiar to it.
As for Mr. Eliot's statement about James and ideas, it is
useful to us because it gives us a clue to what might be called
the sociology of our question. "Henry James had a mind so
fine that no idea could violate it." In the context "violate" is
a strong word, yet we can grant that the mind of the poet is a
sort of Clarissa Harlowe and that an idea is assort of Colonel
Lovelace, for it is a truism of contemporary thought that the
whole nature of man stands in danger of being brutalized by
the intellect, or at least by some one of its apparently accredited surrogates. A specter haunts our culture it is that people
will eventually be unable to say, "They fell in love and married," let alone understand the language of Romeo and Juliet,
but will as a matter of course say, "Their libidinal impulses
being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives
and integrated them within the same frame of reference/'
Now this is not the language of abstract thought or o any
kind of thought. It is the language of non-thought. But it is the
language which is developing from the peculiar status which
we in our culture have given to abstract thought. There can
be no doubt whatever that it constitutes a threat to the emotions and thus to life itself.
286 The Liberal Imagination
The specter of what this sort of language suggests has
haunted us since the end of the eighteenth century. When he
speaks of the mind being violated by an idea, Mr. Eliot, like
the Romantics, is simply voicing his horror at the prospect of
life being intellectualized out of all spontaneity and reality.
We are the people of the idea, and we rightly fear that the
intellect will dry up the blood in our veins and wholly check
the emotional and creative part of the mind. And although I
said that the fear of the total sovereignty of the abstract intellect began in the Romantic period, we are of course touching
here upon Pascal's opposition between two faculties of the
mind, of which V esprit de finesse has its heuristic powers no
less than l } esprit de geometrie, powers of discovery and knowledge which have a particular value for the establishment of
man in society and the universe.
But to call ourselves the people of the idea is to flatter ourselves. We are rather the people of ideology, which is a very
different thing. Ideology is not the product of thought; it is
the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas
to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional
safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding. The
nature of ideology may in part be understood from its tendency to develop the sort of language I parodied, and scarcely
parodied, a moment ago.
It is therefore no wonder that any critical theory that conceives itself to be at the service of the emotions, and of life
itself, should turn a very strict and jealous gaze upon an intimate relationship between literature and ideas, for in our
culture ideas tend to deteriorate into ideology. And indeed it
is scarcely surprising that criticism, in its zeal to protect
literature and life from the tyranny of the rational intellect,
should misinterpret the relationship. Mr. Eliot, if we take him
literally, does indeed misinterpret the relationship when he
conceives of "thinking" in such a way that it must be denied
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 287
to Shakespeare and Dante. It must puzzle us to know what
thinking is if Shakespeare and Dante did not do it.
And it puzzles us to know what Rene Wellek and Austin
Warren mean when in their admirable Theory of Literature
they say that literature can make use of ideas only when ideas
"cease to be ideas in the ordinary sense of concepts and become
symbols, or even myths." I am not sure that the ordinary sense
of ideas actually is concepts, or at any rate concepts of such
abstractness that they do not arouse in us feelings and attitudes. And I take it that when we speak of the relationship of
literature and ideas, the ideas we refer to are not those of
mathematics or of symbolic logic, but only such ideas as can
arouse and traditionally have aroused the feelings the ideas,
for example, of men's relation to one another and to the world.
A poet's simple statement of a psychological fact recalls us to
a proper simplicity about the nature of ideas. "Our continued
influxes of feeling," said Wordsworth, "are modified and
directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives
of all our past feelings." The interflow between emotion and
idea is a psychological fact which we do well to keep clearly
in mind, together with the part that is played by desire, will,
and imagination in philosophy as well as in literature. Mr.
Eliot, and Mr. Wellek and Mr. Warren and in general those
critics who are zealous in the defense of the autonomy of
poetry prefer to forget the ground which is common to both
emotion and thought; they presume ideas to be only the product of formal systems of philosophy, not remembering, at
least on the occasion of their argument, that poets too have
their effect in the world of thought. U esprit de finesse is certainly not to be confused with l f esprit de geometric, but
neither which is precisely the point of Pascal's having distinguished and named the two different qualities of mind
is it to be denied its powers of comprehension and formulation.
Mr. Wellek and Mr. Warren tell us that "the artist will be
288 The Liberal Imagination
hampered by too much ideology * if it remains unassimilated."
We note the tautology of the statement for what else is "too
much" ideology except ideology that is unassimilated? not
because we wish to take a disputatious advantage over authors
to whom we have reason to be grateful, but because the tautology suggests the uneasiness of the position it defends. We are
speaking of art, which is an activity which defines itself exactly
by its powers of assimilation and of which the essence is the
just amount of any of its qualities or elements; of course too
much or unassimilated ideology will "hamper" the artist, but
so will too much of anything, so will too much metaphor:
Coleridge tells us that in a long poem there can be too much
poetry. The theoretical question is simply being begged, out
of an undue anxiety over the "purity" of literature, over its
perfect literariness.
The authors of Theory of Literature are certainly right to
question the "intellectualist misunderstanding of art" and the
"confusions of the functions of art and philosophy" and to look
for the flaws in the scholarly procedures which organize works
of art according to their ideas and their affinities with philosophical systems. Yet on their own showing there has always
been a conscious commerce between the poet and the philosopher, and not every poet has been violated by the ideas that
have attracted him. The sexual metaphor is forced upon us,
not only explicitly by Mr. Eliot but also implicitly by Mr.
Wellek and Mr. Warren, who seem to think of ideas as masculine and gross and of art as feminine and pure, and who
permit a union of the two sexes only when ideas give up their
masculine, effective nature and "cease to be ideas in the ordinary sense and become symbols, or even myths." We naturally ask: symbols of what, myths about what? No anxious
exercise of aesthetic theory can make the ideas of, say, Blake
i The word is used by Mr. Wellek and Mr. Warren, not in the pejorative
sense in which I have earlier used it, but to mean simply a body of
ideas.
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 289
and Lawrence other than what they are intended to be
ideas relating to action and to moral judgment.
This anxiety lest the work of art be other than totally selfcontained, this fear lest the reader make reference to something beyond the work itself, has its origin, as I have previously
suggested, in the reaction from the earlier impulse it goes
far back beyond the nineteenth century to show that art is
justified in comparison with the effective activity of the systematic disciplines. It arises too from the strong contemporary
wish to establish, in a world of unremitting action and effectiveness, the legitimacy of contemplation, which it is now no
longer convenient to associate with the exercises of religion
but which may be associated with the experiences of art. We
will all do well to advance the cause of contemplation, to insist on the right to a haven from perpetual action and effectiveness. But we must not enforce our insistence by dealing with
art as if it were a unitary thing, and by making reference only
to its "purely" aesthetic element, requiring that every work
of art serve our contemplation by being wholly self-contained
and without relation to action. No doubt there is a large body
of literature to which ideas, with their tendency to refer to
action and effectiveness, are alien and inappropriate. But also
much of literature wishes to give the sensations and to win the
responses that are given and won by ideas, and it makes use of
ideas to gain its effects, considering ideas like people, sentiments, things, and scenes to be indispensable elements of
human life. Nor is the intention of this part of literature always an aesthetic one in the strict sense that Mr. Wellek and
Mr. Warren have in mind; there is abundant evidence that the
aesthetic upon which the critic sets primary store is to the
poet himself frequently of only secondary importance.
We can grant that the province of poetry is one thing and
the province of intellection another. But keeping the difference well in mind, we must yet see that systems of ideas have a
290 The Liberal Imagination
particular quality which is much coveted as their chief effect
let us even say as their chief aesthetic effect by at least
certain kinds of literary works. Say what we will as critics and
teachers trying to defend the province of art from the dogged
tendency of our time to ideologize all things into grayness, say
what we will about the "purely" literary, the purely aesthetic
values, we as readers know that we demand of our literature
some of the virtues which define a successful work of systematic
thought. We want it to have at least when it is appropriate
for it to have, which is by no means infrequently the authority, the cogency, the completeness, the brilliance, the hardness
of systematic thought. 2
Of late years criticism has been much concerned to insist on
the indirection and the symbolism of the language of poetry.
I do not doubt that the language of poetry is very largely that
of indirection and symbolism. But it is not only that. Poetry
is closer to rhetoric than we today are willing to admit; syntax
plays a greater part in it than our current theory grants, and
syntax connects poetry with rational thought, for, as Hegel
says, "grammar, in its extended and consistent form" by
which he means syntax "is the work of thought, which makes
its categories distinctly visible therein." And those poets of
our time who make the greatest impress upon us are those who
are most aware of rhetoric, which is to say, of the intellectual
content of their -work. Nor is the intellectual content of their
work simply the inevitable effect produced by good intelligence turned to poetry; many of these poets Yeats and Eliot
2 Mr. Wellek and Mr. Warren say something of the same sort, but only,
as
it were, in a concessive way: "Philosophy, ideological content, in its
proper
context, seems to enhance artistic value because it corroborates
several important artistic values: those of complexity and coherence. . . . But it
need not
be so. The artist will be hampered by too much ideology if it remains
unassimilated" (p. 122). Earlier (p. 27) they say: "Serious art implies a view
of life
which can be stated in philosophical terms, even in terms of systems.
Between
artistic coherence . . . and philosophic coherence there is some kind of
correlation/' They then hasten to distinguish between emotion and
thinking,
sensibility and intellection, etc., and to tell us that art is more complex
than
"propaganda."
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 291
himself come most immediately to mind have been at great
pains to develop consistent intellectual positions along with,
and consonant with, their work in poetry.
The aesthetic effect of intellectual cogency, I am convinced,
is not to be slighted. Let me give an example for what it is
worth. Of recent weeks my mind has been much engaged by
two statements, disparate in length and in genre, although as
it happens they have related themes. One is a couplet of Yeats:
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare.
I am hard put to account for the force of the statement. It certainly does not lie in any metaphor, for only the dimmest sort
of metaphor is to be detected. Nor does it lie in any special
power of the verse. The statement has for me the pleasure of
relevance and cogency, in part conveyed to me by the content,
in part by the rhetoric. The other statement is Freud's short
book, his last, An Outline of Psychoanalysis., which gives me a
pleasure which is no doubt different from that given by Yeats's
couplet, but which is also similar; it is the pleasure of listening to a strong, decisive, self -limiting voice uttering statements
to which I can give assent. The pleasure I have in responding
to Freud I find very difficult to distinguish from the pleasure
which is involved in responding to a satisfactory work of art.
Intellectual assent in literature is not quite the same thing
as agreement. We can take pleasure in literature where we do
not agree, responding to the power or grace of a mind without
admitting the tightness of its intention or conclusion we can
take our pleasure from an intellect's cogency, without making
a final judgment on the correctness or adaptability of what it
says.
11
And now I leave these general theoretical matters for a more
particular concern the relation of contemporary American
The Liberal Imagination
literature to ideas. In order to come at this as directly as possible we might compare modern American prose literature
for American poetry is a different thing with modern
European literature. European literature of, say, the last thirty
or forty years seems to me to be, in the sense in which I shall
use the word, essentially an active literature. It does not, at its
best, consent to be merely comprehended. It refuses to be
understood as a "symptom" of its society, although of course
it may be that, among other things. It does not submit to being
taped. We as scholars and critics try to discover the source of its
effective energy and of course we succeed in some degree. But
inevitably we become aware that it happily exists beyond our
powers of explanation, although not, certainly, beyond our
powers of response. Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka, Yeats and
Eliot himself do not allow us to finish with them; and the refusal is repeated by a great many European writers less large
than these. With exceptions that I shall note, the same thing
cannot be said of modern American literature. American
literature seems to me essentially passive: our minds tend always to be made up about this or that American author,
and we incline to speak of him, not merely incidentally but
conclusively, in terms of his moment in history, of the conditions of the culture that "produced" him. Thus American literature as an academic subject is not so much a subject as an
object of study: it does not, as a literature should, put the
scrutinizer of it under scrutiny but, instead, leaves its students
with a too comfortable sense of complete comprehension.
When we try to discover the root of this difference between European and American literature, we are led to the
conclusion that it is the difference between the number and
weight or force of the ideas which the two literatures embody
or suggest. I do not mean that European literature makes use
of, as American literature does not, the ideas of philosophy or
theology or science. Kafka does not exemplify Kierkegaard,
Proust does not dramatize Bergson. One way of putting the
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 293
relationship of this literature to ideas is to say that the literature of contemporary Europe is in competition with philosophy, theology, and science, that it seeks to match them in comprehensiveness and power and seriousness.
This is not to say that the best of contemporary European
literature makes upon us the effect of a rational system of
thought. Quite the contrary, indeed; it is precisely its artistic
power that we respond to, which I take in part to be its power
of absorbing and disturbing us in secret ways. But this power
it surely derives from its commerce, according to its own rules,
with systematic ideas.
For in the great issues with which the mind has traditionally
been concerned there is, I would submit, something primi live
which is of the highest value to the literary artist. I know that
it must seem a strange thing to say, for. we are in the habit of
thinking of systematic ideas as being of the very essence of the
not-primitive, of the highly developed. No doubt they are: but
they are at the same time the means by which a complex civilization keeps the primitive in mind and refers to it. Whence
and whither, birth and death, fate, free will, and immortality
these are never far from systematic thought; and Freud's
belief that the child's first inquiry beyond which, really, the
adult does not go in kind is in effect a sexual one seems to
me to have an empirical support from literature. The ultimate
questions of conscious and rational thought about the nature
of man and his destiny match easily in the literary mind with
the dark unconscious and with the most primitive human relationships. Love, parenthood, incest, patricide: these are
what the great ideas suggest to literature, these are the means
by which they express themselves. I need but mention three
great works of different ages to suggest how true this is: Oedipus, Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov.
Ideas, if they are large enough and of a certain kind, are not
only not hostile to the creative process, as some think, but are
virtually inevitable to it. Intellectual power and emotional
294 The Liberal Imagination
power go together. And if we can say, as I think we can, that
contemporary American prose literature in general lacks emotional power, it is possible to explain the deficiency by reference to the intellectual weakness of American prose literature.
The situation in verse is different. Perhaps this is to be accounted for by the fact that the best of our poets are, as good
poets usually are, scholars of their tradition. There is present
to their minds the degree of intellectual power which poetry
is traditionally expected to exert. Questions of form and questions of language seem of themselves to demand, or to create,
an adequate subject matter; and a highly developed aesthetic
implies a matter strong enough to support its energy. We have
not a few poets who are subjects and not objects, who are active
and not passive. One does not finish quickly, if at all, with the
best work of, say, Cummings, Stevens, and Marianne Moore.
This work is not exempt from our judgment, even from adverse judgment, but it is able to stay with a mature reader as a
continuing element of his spiritual life. Of how many writers
of prose fiction can we say anything like the same thing?
The topic which was originally proposed to me for this occasion and which I have taken the liberty of generalizing was
the debt of four American writers to Freud and Spengler. The
four writers were O'Neill, Dos Passos, Wolfe, and Faulkner.
Of the first three how many can be continuing effective elements of our mental lives? I hope I shall never read Mr. Dos
Passos without interest nor ever lose the warm though qualified respect that I feel for his work. But it is impossible for me
to feel of this work that it is autonomous, that it goes on existing beyond our powers of explanation. As for Eugene O'Neill
and Thomas Wolfe, I can respect the earnestness of their dedication, but I caanot think of having a living, reciprocal relation with what they have written. And I believe that is because
these men, without intellectual capital of their own, don't
owe a sufficient debt of ideas to anyone. Spengler is certainly
not a great mind; at best he is but a considerable dramatist of
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 295
the idea of world history and of, as it were, the natural history
of cultures; and we can find him useful as a critic who summarizes the adverse views of our urban, naturalistic culture
which many have held. Freud is a very great rnind indeed.
Without stopping to specify what actual influence of ideas was
exerted by Spengler and Freud on O'Neill, Dos Passos, or
Wolfe, or even to consider whether there was any influence at
all, we can fairly assume that all are in something of the same
ambiance. But if, in that ambiance, we want the sense of the
actuality of doom actuality being one of the qualities we
expect of literature surely we do better to seek it in Spengler
himself than in any of the three literary artists, just as, if we
want the sense of the human mystery, of tragedy truly conceived in the great terms of free will, necessity, and hope,
surely we do far better to seek it directly in Freud himself
than in these three literary men.
In any extended work of literature, the aesthetic effect, as I
have said, depends in large degree upon intellectual power,
upon the amount and recalcitrance of the material the mind
works on, and upon the mind's success in mastering the large
material. And it is exactly the lack of intellectual power that
makes our three writers, after our first response of interest, so
inadequate aesthetically. We have only to compare, say, Dos
Passos's USA to a work of similar kind and intention, Flaubert's L'Education Sentiment ale , to see that in Dos Passos's
novel the matter encompassed is both less in amount and less in
resistance than in Flaubert's; the energy of the encompassing
mind is also less. Or we consider O'NeilFs crude, dull notion
of the unconscious and his merely elementary grasp of Freud's
ideas about sex and we recognize the lamentable signs of a
general inadequacy of mind. Or we ask what it is about
Thomas Wolfe that always makes us uncomfortable with his
talent, so that even his admirers deal with him not as a subject
but as an object an object which must be explained and accounted for and we are forced to answer that it is the dis-
296** The Liberal Imagination
proportion between the energy of his utterance and his power
of mind. It is customary to say of Thomas Wolfe that he is an
emotional writer. Perhaps: although it is probably not the
most accurate way to describe a writer who could deal with
but one single emotion; and we feel that it is a function of his
unrelenting, tortured egoism that he could not submit his
mind to the ideas that might have brought the variety and
interest of order to the single, dull chaos of his powerful selfregard, for it is true that the intellect makes many emotions
out of the primary egoistic one.
At this point it may be well to recall what our subject is. It
is not merely the part that is played in literature by those ideas
which may be derived from the study of systematic, theoretical
works; it is the part that is played in literature by ideas in
general. To be sure, the extreme and most difficult instance of
the general relation of literature to ideas is the relation of
literature to highly developed and formulated ideas; and because this is indeed so difficult a matter, and one so often misconceived, I have put a special emphasis upon it. But we do
not present our subject adequately we do not, indeed, represent the mind adequately if we think of ideas only as being
highly formulated. It will bring us back to the proper generality of our subject if I say that the two contemporary writers
who hold out to me the possibility of a living reciprocal relationship with their work are Ernest Hemingway and Wil-
liam Faulkner it will bring us back the more dramatically
because Hemingway and Faulkner have insisted on their indifference to the conscious intellectual tradition of our time
and have acquired the reputation of achieving their effects by
means that have the least possible connection with any sort of
intellectuality or even with intelligence.
In trying to explain a certain commendable quality which
is to be found in the work of Hemingway and Faulkner and
a certain quality only, not a total and unquestionable literary
virtue we are not called upon by our subject to show that
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 297
particular recognizable ideas o a certain force or weight are
"used" in the work. Nor are we called upon to show that new
ideas o a certain force and weight are "produced" by the
work. All that we need to do is account for a certain aesthetic
effect as being in some important part achieved by a mental
process which is not different from the process by which discursive ideas are conceived, and which is to be judged by some
of the criteria by which an idea is judged.
The aesthetic effect which I have in mind can be suggested
by a word that I have used before activity. We feel that Hemingway and Faulkner are intensely at work upon the recalcitrant stuff of life; when they are at their best they give us the
sense that the amount and intensity of their activity are in a
satisfying proportion to the recalcitrance of the material. And
our pleasure in their activity is made the more secure because
we have the distinct impression that the two novelists are not
under any illusion that they have conquered the material upon
which they direct their activity. The opposite is true of Dos
Passos, O'Neill, and Wolfe; at each point of conclusion in
their work we feel that they feel that they have said the last
word, and we feel this even when they represent themselves,
as O'Neill and Wolfe so often do, as puzzled and baffled by life.
But of Hemingway and Faulkner we seldom have the sense
that they have deceived themselves, that they have misrepresented to themselves the nature and the difficulty of the matter
they work on. And we go on to make another intellectual
judgment: we say that the matter they present, together with
the degree of difficulty which they assume it to have, seems to
be very cogent. This, we say, is to the point; this really has
something to do with life as we live it; we cannot ignore it.
There is a traditional and aggressive rationalism that can
understand thought only in its conscious, developed form and
believes that the phrase "unconscious mind" is a meaningless
contradiction in terms. Such a view, wrong as I think it is, has
at least the usefulness of warning us that we must not call by
298 The Liberal Imagination
the name of thought or idea all responses of the human organism whatever. But the extreme rationalist position ignores
the simple fact that the life of reason, at least in its most extensive part, begins in the emotions. What comes into being
when two contradictory emotions are made to confront each
other and are required to have a relationship with each other
is, as I have said, quite properly called an idea. Ideas may also
be said to be generated in the opposition of ideals, and in the
felt awareness of the impact of new circumstances upon old
forms of feeling and estimation, in the response to the conflict
between new exigencies and old pieties. And it can be said
that a work will have what I have been calling cogency in the
degree that the confronting emotions go deep, or in the degree
that the old pieties are firmly held and the new exigencies
strongly apprehended. In Hemingway's stories 3 a strongly
charged piety toward the ideals and attachments of boyhood
and the lusts of maturity is in conflict not only with the imagination of death but also with that imagination as it is peculiarly modified by the dark negation of the modern world.
Faulkner as a Southerner of today, a man deeply implicated
in the pieties of his tradition, is of course at the very heart of
an exigent historical event which thrusts upon him the aware-
ness of the inadequacy and wrongness of the very tradition he
loves. In the work of both men the cogency is a function not
of their conscious but of their unconscious minds. We can, if
we admire Tolstoi and Dostoevski, regret the deficiency of
consciousness, blaming it for the inadequacy in both our
American writers of the talent for generalization. 4 Yet it is to
be remarked that the unconscious minds of both men have
wisdom and humility about themselves. They seldom make
3 It is in the stories rather than in the novels that Hemingway is
characteristic and at his best.
4 Although there is more impulse to generalization than is usually
supposed.
This is especially true of Faulkner, who has never subscribed to the
contemporary belief that only concrete words have power and that only the
representation of things and actions is dramatic.
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 299
the attempt at formulated solution, they rest content with the
"negative capability." And this negative capability, this willingness to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, is
not, as one tendency of modern feeling would suppose, an abdication of intellectual activity. Quite to the contrary, it is
precisely an aspect of their intelligence, of their seeing the full
force and complexity of their subject matter. And this we can
understand the better when we observe how the unconscious
minds of Dos Passos, O'Neill, and Wolfe do not possess humility and wisdom; nor are they fully active, as the intellectual
histories of all three men show. A passivity on the part of Dos
Passos before the idea of the total corruption of American
civilization has issued in his later denial of the possibility of
economic and social reform and in his virtually unqualified
acceptance of the American status quo. A passivity on the part
of O'Neill before the cliches of economic and metaphysical
materialism issued in his later simplistic Catholicism. The
passivity of Thomas Wolfe before all his experience led him
to that characteristic malice toward the objects or partners of
his experience which no admirer of his ever takes account of,
and eventually to that simple affirmation, recorded in You
Can't Go Home Again, that literature must become the agent
of the immediate solution of all social problems and undertake the prompt eradication of human pain; and because his
closest friend did not agree that this was a possible thing for
literature to do, Wolfe terminated the friendship. These are
men of whom it is proper to speak of their having been violated
by ideas; but we must observe that it was an excess of intellectual passivity that invited the violence.
In speaking of Hemingway and Faulkner I have used the
word "piety." It is a word that I have chosen with some care
and despite the pejorative meanings that nowadays adhere to
it, for I wished to avoid the word "religion/* and piety is not
religion, yet I wished too to have religion come to mind as it
inevitably must when piety is mentioned. Carlyle says of
300 The Liberal Imagination
Shakespeare that he was the product of medieval Catholicism,
and implies that Catholicism at the distance at which Shakespeare stood from it had much to do with the power of Shakespeare's intellect. Allen Tate has developed in a more particular way an idea that has much in common with what
Carlyle here implies. Loosely put, the idea is that religion in
its decline leaves a detritus of pieties, of strong assumptions,
which afford a particularly fortunate condition for certain
kinds of literature; these pieties carry a strong charge of intellect, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they
tend to stimulate the mind in a powerful way.
Religious emotions are singularly absent from Shakespeare
and it does not seem possible to say of him that he was a religious man. Nor does it seem possible to say of the men of the
great period of American literature in the nineteenth century
that they were religious men. Hawthorne and Melville, for
example, lived at a time when religion was in decline and they
were not drawn to support it. But from religion they inherited
a body of pieties, a body of issues, if you will, which engaged
their hearts and their minds to the very bottom. Henry James
was not a religious man and there is not the least point in the
world in trying to make him out one. But you need not accept all the implications of Quentin Anderson's thesis that
James allegorized his father's religious system to see that Mr.
Anderson is right when he says that James was dealing, in his
own way, with the questions that his father's system propounded. This will indicate something of why James so catches
our imagination today, and why we turn so eagerly again to
Hawthorne and Melville.
The piety which descends from religion is not the only possible piety, as the case of Faulkner reminds us, and perhaps,
also the case of Hemingway. But we naturally mention first
that piety which does descend from religion because it is most
likely to have in it the quality of transcendence which, whether
we admit it or no, we expect literature at its best to have.
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 301
The subject is extremely delicate and complex and I do no
more than state it barely and crudely. But no matter how I
state it, I am sure that you will see that what I am talking about
leads us to the crucial issue of our literary culture.
I know that I will not be wrong it I assume that most of us
here are in our social and political beliefs consciously liberal
and democratic. And I know that I will not be wrong if I say
that most of us, and in the degree of our commitment to literature and our familiarity with it, find that the contemporary
authors we most wish to read and most wish to admire for their
literary qualities demand of us a great agility and ingenuity
in coping with their antagonism to our social and political
ideals. For it is in general true that the modern European
literature to which we can have an active, reciprocal relationship, which is the right relationship to have, has been written
by men who are indifferent to, or even hostile to, the tradition
of democratic liberalism as we know it. Yeats and Eliot, Proust
and Joyce, Lawrence and Gide these men do not seem to
confirm us in the social and political ideals which we hold.
If we now turn and consider the contemporary literature
of America, we see that wherever we can describe it as patently
liberal and democratic, we must say that it is not of lasting interest. I do not say that the work which is written to conform
to the liberal democratic tradition is of no value but only that
we do not incline to return to it, we do not establish it in our
minds and affections. Very likely we learn from it as citizens;
and as citizen-scholars and citizen-critics we understand and
explain it. But we do not live in an active reciprocal relation
with it. The sense of largeness, of cogency, of the transcendence which largeness and cogency can give, the sense of being
reached in our secret and primitive minds this we virtually
never get from the writers of the liberal democratic tradition
at the present time.
And since liberal democracy inevitably generates a body of
ideas, it must necessarily occur to us to ask why it is that these
302 The Liberal Imagination
particular ideas have not infused with force and cogency the
literature that embodies them. This question is the most important, the most fully challenging question in culture that at
this moment we can ask.
The answer to it cannot of course even be begun here, and I
shall be more than content if now it is merely accepted as a
legitimate question. But there are one or two things that may
be said about the answer, about the direction we must take to
reach it in its proper form. We will not find it if we come to
facile conclusions about the absence from our culture of the
impressive ideas of traditional religion. I have myself referred
to the historical fact that religion has been an effective means
of transmitting or of generating ideas of a sort which I feel are
necessary for the literary qualities we want, and to some this
will no doubt mean that I believe religion to be a necessary
condition of great literature. I do not believe that; and what is
more, I consider it from many points of view an impropriety
to try to guarantee literature by religious belief.
Nor will we find our answer if we look for it in the weakness
of the liberal democratic ideas in themselves. It is by no means
true that the inadequacy of the literature that connects itself
with a body of ideas is the sign of the inadequacy of those ideas,
although it is no doubt true that some ideas have less affinity
with literature than others.
Our answer, I believe, will rather be found in a cultural
fact in the kind of relationship which we, or the writers
who represent us, maintain toward the ideas we claim as
ours, and in our habit of conceiving the nature of ideas in
general. If we find that it is true of ourselves that we conceive ideas to be pellets of intellection or crystallizations of
thought, precise and completed, and defined by their coherence and their procedural recommendations, then we shall
have accounted for the kind of prose literature we have. And
if we find that we do indeed have this habit, and if we continue in it, we can predict that our literature will continue
The Meaning of a Literary Idea 303
much as it is. But i we are drawn to revise our habit of conceiving ideas in this way and learn instead to think of ideas
as living things, inescapably connected with our wills and
desires, as susceptible of growth and development by their
very nature, as showing their life by their tendency to change,
as being liable, by this very tendency, to deteriorate and become corrupt and to work harm, then we shall stand in a rela-
tion to ideas which makes an active literature possible.
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